Gopher Damage to Vegetable Gardens — What Gets Eaten and How to Stop It

A vegetable garden is one of the most attractive targets for a gopher on your property. The concentrated planting, consistent irrigation, and diverse root crops that characterize a productive vegetable garden provide everything a gopher wants — and the damage can be devastating and rapid. A single gopher can work through an entire raised bed or in-ground garden in days.

What Gophers Eat in the Vegetable Garden

Gophers eat roots, tubers, and underground plant material. In a vegetable garden this translates to direct consumption of the edible portions of root vegetables — carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and parsnips are consumed underground before the gardener ever harvests them. The plant tops wilt and die without visible cause, and when the gardener goes to harvest, the roots are simply gone.

Plants that are not root vegetables are attacked from below — the gopher consumes the root system, cutting off water and nutrient uptake and causing sudden wilting and death. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, corn, and other above-ground producers suddenly collapse and die when their root systems are eaten. The plant appears healthy one day and wilted the next, often with no surface evidence of what happened.

Bulbs — onions, garlic, shallots — are eaten directly. Gophers are attracted to the strong scent of alliums and will seek them out specifically. Despite the folk claim that gophers avoid garlic and onions, the opposite is generally true in practice.

Signs of Gopher Activity in the Garden

Fan-shaped mounds of loose soil appearing at the garden's edge or within raised beds are the clearest sign. Plants wilting suddenly without obvious above-ground cause — especially if neighboring plants are unaffected — indicate root damage below. Entire plants disappearing underground, pulled down by a gopher harvesting the root system, are a dramatic and unmistakable sign. In raised beds, gophers tunneling up through the bottom will push loose soil to the surface in a way that disturbs the bed's planting surface even before plants show damage.

The Raised Bed Question

Many gardeners assume raised beds provide protection from gophers. Standard raised beds without hardware cloth lining on the bottom do not stop gophers — the animals simply tunnel up through the native soil into the bed from below. A gopher that enters a raised bed from underneath has access to a concentrated supply of food in a confined area and will damage the entire bed rapidly.

Hardware cloth lining — 1/2-inch galvanized wire mesh stapled to the bottom of the raised bed frame before filling — provides effective protection against gopher entry from below. This is the most reliable passive protection measure for vegetable gardens. See our separate article on how to properly gopher-proof a raised bed.

Treatment Options

Active gopher control — trapping or carbon monoxide — removes the animal causing current damage. For vegetable gardens specifically, our chemical-free methods are the only appropriate approach: no rodenticide bait should ever be used near edible plants, as bait placed in proximity to a food garden creates unacceptable contamination risk regardless of how it is positioned. We never use bait. Trapping and CO are completely safe for vegetable gardens.

Related Articles

• How to Gopher-Proof a Raised Vegetable Garden
• Do Gopher-Resistant Plants Actually Work?
• What Do Gophers Eat?
• Why Chemical-Free Control Is the Only Option Near Food Gardens

Call 909-599-4711 for chemical-free gopher control safe for vegetable gardens throughout Southern California.