Mole Tunnels in Horry County Lawns

The look-alike worth ruling out

Armadillo craters and mole cricket damage. Three different problems, three treatments, so this is worth two minutes with a hand fork. A mole works from below and pushes soil up, so the damage is a continuous ridge you can trace with your foot, plus low cones of spoil, and the grass on the ridge is lifted rather than removed. An armadillo works from above and throws soil out, leaving separate cone shaped craters roughly three to five inches wide with intact grass between them, and it disturbs mulch and pushes bedding plants out of the ground. Mole crickets do something different again: their tunneling is much finer, close to the surface, the turf goes spongy and thin, and it pulls up easily because the roots underneath have been chewed. Ridges mean a mole. Craters and uprooted plants mean an armadillo. Thin spongy turf with no ridges and no craters means an insect.

How it gets dealt with properly

The first thing a competent visit does is confirm what you actually have, because a lawn can carry mole ridges, armadillo craters and a mole cricket problem in the same season and the three do not respond to the same thing. After that comes the question of how much of the tunnel network is live, which is settled by flattening sections of ridge, marking them and reading them a day later. That matters more than it sounds, since a lawn that looks overrun frequently turns out to have one animal working a handful of runs, and treating the abandoned tunnels achieves nothing except spending your money.

Clemson's position on control is that trapping is the most effective method in South Carolina lawns, and the reason is placement rather than the trap itself. A trap set correctly in a confirmed active run, at the right depth for sandy soil, does the job, whereas the same trap dropped into a dead tunnel sits there for two weeks. Where a real grub count justifies it, treating the turf reduces part of the food supply, though it is only fair to say that grub products do nothing to earthworms and a mole will settle for worms quite happily, so this is a contributing measure rather than a cure. Castor oil based repellents have some standing but Clemson notes they have to be reapplied often to keep working. Correcting the irrigation and improving the turf are the slow, unfashionable measures that hold the ground afterwards.

The damage and the clean-up

Mole damage is cosmetic in the strict sense and still costs real money, which is why homeowners get irritated when it is waved away. Ridges get torn open by mower wheels and leave bare sandy strips that weeds colonize first. Soil cones spread across the turf, blunt blades and smother grass beneath them. Roots along a run get lifted and separated from the soil, so a line of grass browns off in dry weather even though nothing ate it, and shallow rooted bedding plants and new plugs can be undermined and dry out. Repair is straightforward but it is work: collapse and firm the runs, roll the surface, topdress with sand or a sandy soil mix, then plug or reseed the bare lines and keep them watered until they knit. One further point clears up the most common complaint on this subject. If bulbs, roots or the base of a shrub are actually being eaten, look for mice and voles, which will happily travel an abandoned mole run to reach them. The tunnel is the mole's work. The chewing is not.

The homeowner side of this

There is honest work here for a homeowner and one popular waste of money. The useful part is diagnosis and water: identify the damage properly, mark and monitor a few ridges so you know what is live, dial the irrigation back to what the grass needs, get downspouts discharging away from the turf, and roll or topdress the ridges so mowing stops tearing them open. Retail traps do work if they go into an active run at the right depth, and reading a run before setting anything is most of the skill. What consistently disappoints is the aisle of gadgets: vibrating stakes, ultrasonic spikes, mothballs down a hole and the various things people pour into a tunnel. Poison baits shaped like worms are also a genuine risk around a dog that digs, which is worth thinking about before buying any.