I found my camera. Behind the truck seat. I thought I had lost it "into the compost" the day I dug these. It was Oct 1 last year.

Last year's sweet potato experiment was using boxes protected by 1/2" hardware cloth. Too much material laying around. Too many tools. Too many stupid internet ideas. So I went and made these boxes. The idea was to have a vole proof box. And being above ground, it would be easier to harvest. The bottoms were 1/2" hardware cloth tacked across. And then the sides had a layer around the circumference, about 18" high. It would need to be a tiny vole to get through that wire.

As I learned on Oct 1st, all the vines from the sweet potatoes, sprawling over the side, provided excellent rope ladders. And the fence and black plastic cover provided superior protection for the voles to raise more mouths to feed right in that beautiful compost.

I need to figure a way to get rid of these voles, or a way to grow sweet potatoes that they can't get to.

I hadn't planned to harvest them all that day, as it seemed early, but the extent of the damage after I got to the sweet potatoes was so severe that I decided it was now or never. Some of the sweet potatoes were cracked/split. Many never sized up beyond a little thickness. And most of the good ones were eaten. It was so depressing, I stopped taking pics of the carnage and just got it over with.

It wasn't a total loss. I had one row of Lehigh potatoes, on the outside 1 ft where the black plastic didn't cover. I had extra seed potatoes and put them in at some point. The potatoes did great, and just one plant had damage to some potatoes, and that damage looked old, long before harvest. So 1ft x 9ft of potatoes did fine, but the other 4ft x 9ft of sweet potatoes got ravaged. CONT.

I clearly made an excellent bedding area for the voles.

I started on the potato side. I never saw an adult vole but found two separate litters. The mothers surely fled before I got to the plastic.


So...
This year I am thinking of using 15 gal grow bags instead. Bought them cheap last year. Will use the same medium, basically, good compost. I can put the bags on benches. Make the bench legs out of EMT or rebar so the voles can't climb. Run drip tape down the row bags. Put a trellis next to them and weave the vines up.

I don't really want to do any of this, I just want the voles gone. Be a lot easier to just put them in the ground. They grow great. Uses less water. But they just get destroyed.

Even a lot of sweet peppers got destroyed by what I'm certain was voles, climbing up the stalks of my florida weave double rows. I never saw squirrels there, but noticed a vole leaving at least once. I think maybe the black plastic mulch has this drawback, that it provides shelter for them.

@JRinPA sorry to see this. I know that it is very discouraging. My sweet potato harvest the first year was awful. I hardly got any potatoes and the ones I got were huge and had ugly cracks. The variety that I grew was Beauregard.

I have lots of clay in my soil and I think that when the tubers got down the the clay layer they couldn't grow down into it so they just grew sideways.

Last year was a good year. I planted in hills to give them extra depth and I bought a bush variety called Vardeman online so that the vines would not go so far.

The garden where I grew them is not fenced and I did not mulch the plants. Mulch is very attractive to voles as you discovered. The sweet potato vines kept the weeds down so I did not have a problem with those. I feed a couple of feral cats and I know that there is also a red fox patrolling the area so they really help me with voles and bunnies in the garden.

I don't have any photos of the vines growing.

Here is the first year's pathetic harvest.

20190928_135355 by Brownrexx, on Flickr


and now last year's harvest. I was very pleased.

Vardeman Sweet by Brownrexx, on Flickr

Voles are a pain in my garden too, and can be really frustrating. I can't use any heavy mulch or agricultural weed barrier, for the same reason... to voles, that is just a protected nesting site. That's a heartbreaking loss, @JRinPA.

I have lots of clay in my soil and I think that when the tubers got down the the clay layer they couldn't grow down into it so they just grew sideways.

Oh, how I wish I had that problem! The one time I tried sweet potatoes here, I was afraid they wouldn't produce in my climate. My fear was misplaced, because the plants DID produce tubers - about a foot deep, well below my tilling depth, and deep into the rocky sub-soil. Oh, and anywhere within a 3-foot radius of the plant. Harvesting them wasn't digging, it was excavation... and left such a lasting negative impression that I haven't grown them since.

It had been my intent to try sweet potatoes again this year, using varieties which tended to produce tubers directly under the plant. But the varieties I wanted - from Sandhill Preservation - were destroyed in last year's Iowa Derecho.

@zeedman I got mine from Georges Plant Farm in TN. The bush variety that I got is called Vardeman and I liked it. The potatoes were all located just under the crown of the plant.

https://tatorman.com/

I've had good success growing in cattle mineral tubs. I think they are around 20 gallon capacity. I used 3 year old wood chips as the medium. This picture was from 2020.

I also grow in the ground. But I keep the area around the sweets cleanly mown to deter voles.
quick image upload

I'm so sorry your sweets got ravaged. So disheartening! There are moles here and there in the garden but thankfully I've never had a problem with voles.

It looks like @Uncle_Feist has a good idea there with planting in the tubs. Maybe you could do a small trial with some kind of tub this year to see how that goes,

The second box, I forgot to mention, was about 4x4ft. 9 slips, to the right of the 9x5ft which had 4x6or7 so maybe 26 slips. I harvested the second box a week or two later. It also got probably halfway destroyed. I found nest materials in that one but no young. All together I think we got about 35 lb on about 35 mediocre slips. I didn't weigh them, but that sounds about right. I was shooting for well over 100lb. We made 4 big electric skillets worth during the holidays and I still have a lot of smaller ones to use for slips this year. I'm told that skillet takes 8-10 lb bag when bought at the store. But man, it was just a shame, like 80% were destroyed. Everything was set well above the wire bottom, but the roots were reaching down through for water. The boxes were dense, really dense with roots set - so that worked - but almost all eaten away. I had to put away the camera, too depressing, and then I thought I must have lost it in the piles of dirt. I just found it when I took my backup shotgun (the bottom most gun case) out from behind the truck seat now that hunting is over.

This was the third year for sweet potatoes.
1st year, at comm garden, "hey, I have some extra slips, want them?" I just broadforked, put them in the ground, covered with a little compost, didn't harvest until November, many irregular shapes, some split, some rotted, some eaten, but still some decent ones. It had rained a LOT that October. Had I harvested a month earlier, it would have been an enormous haul from 10-12 slips. (I should probably just go back to that, thinking about it.)
2nd year, at the house, one 20 ft raised bed had them interplanted among lots of other stuff, they were dug late Oct. They were decent shape, but some slips didn't produce. Thirty feet away, two rows interplanted in the garden were utterly annihilated by voles.
3rd year, at comm garden, "Build the Wall" vole proof boxes became vole friendly luxury condos. Checked and then harvested Oct 1st. There were a lot of really nice big sweet potato skins husks! If this had worked, would have been nice, harvest was easy enough. Could have used a snow shovel. But watering the boxes was kind of a pain, with hose. It was pretty dry here last year until August.

Maybe in-ground would be okay, no black mulch over top, but with running the vines up a fence like GoDawgs. That looked like it worked well last year. And/or the grow bags.

Timing wise, since I will have my own healthy slips this year, I can see holding off on planting until peas come out, mid-late June. By then the ground will be warmer.

My brother has been talking about some type of bucket trap for voles. Not sure if he means a walk the plank type trap or not. They work for mice with a ramp leading up. He is talking about burying them most of the way. It might work. They do work for mice.

I never see cats over at the comm garden. It is fenced. Would catnip attract some? I'd try it. There used to be a "cat lady" that lived just a hundred yards from there, but she passed at some point. That house and the farm fields behind were developed 25 years ago. She had probably 25 cats at a time, minimum, roaming around. That side of the road is now a gas station and one of those twisty road developments, now.

At the house, I've had at least one springer for the last 20 years. Cats cruise by the perimeter of the yard, but they don't generally linger long enough to hunt. The dogs get let out at random. They hunt birds, not voles. They try to mouse around some, but they would break plants and I mostly don't let them because I don't want them to get worms from eating rodents.

JRinPA wrote: ↑Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:10 pm Maybe in-ground would be okay, no black mulch over top, but with running the vines up a fence like GoDawgs. That looked like it worked well last year. And/or the grow bags.

@JRinPA , maybe an Uncle Feist tub with a trellis over it?? Stakes on either side of the tub with fencing mounted above the tub... Just thinking out loud.

[attachment=0]IMG_20211105_134515388_HDR.jpg[/attachment][mention]JRinPA[/mention]
I use 15 gallon black containers and place them along my chain link fence. I plant one slip for container average yield three and a half to 4 lb per container

Will the 15 gal grow bags I already have be that much different than the 20 gallon plastic tubs? I get that I wouldn't have to elevate the tubs on a bench. But I could grow lettuce/spinach under the bench in the row so that row would not be wasted, more like doubled up.

Unfortunately I cut a lot of holes the bottom of a potato tower barrel I tried a few years ago. The tower failed and other than a compost bin, I can't see much use for it.

I miss the bygone days, way back in 2018, when I only had a vague understanding of what a Vole even was, LOL!


edit to add: the other idea I had was to try them in my rain gutter buckets. I thought of it a year back, to try sweet potatoes UNDER pepper plants on there. But forgot about it last May/June. I have two ten foot sections that hold 9 buckets each. The pots are only 3.4 gal though. I have no idea how they would grow with that much water available, but the nice thing is that water is rain barrel fed so usually free in Aug-Sept.

I should have plenty of slips to try different things this year. I grew some last year, some that did get planted as replacements for weak/dying slips, but they were late. I couldn't say whether they produced. The quality of slips I bought at Agway last year was really terrible. They should have been free, not $7.99 a doz. Mosquito larvae in the off colored water....that water is supposed to be changed, not just topped off by rain.

I use the plastic containers because I have Gophers. I don't think that there's much differences between the grow bags and the container. The only thing that I would suggest is to put the grow bags on top of a piece of wood or some cement pavers or even use the hardware cloth that you have under them just in case the Vole try to dig into the bottom side.
Mike