hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny and today we are going to talk about
a very common problem in gardening yes i am talking about voles voles are little rodents
for lack of a better term they're actually in the hamster family they look a lot like
large mice and if you have them in your garden you know how absolutely destructive
they can be because one of their main food sources is the roots of plants
especially hostas and plants that have bulbs they love to burrow under and they will eat
those roots you don't even know that you maybe have voles until all of a sudden
you have plants that just suddenly die and then when you go to pick up their foliage or you know
explore what's going on the whole entire foliage just comes out in your hands and you have no roots
we are here today at my mama's garden um and she is currently battling voles pretty badly so she um
had come up with a whole system to try to create these cages around her hostas and it was just a
lot of work and effort it was being effective but it was just very time consuming and a lot of work
around that same time we were contacted by the company the volking the volking is a
fellow north carolinian company that makes these wire bags to protect your plants from
voles and so they say hey can we send you some samples and i was like yes that would be fantastic
so i just turned the whole box straight over to my mama and i said go for it mama see how they work
see if you like them how easy are they to install so forth and so on she's had them for a couple of
weeks now and absolutely loves them she's actually gone through the whole box and has reordered
more so what i'm going to show you today is their product that really has been a huge lifesaver
from my mama and i know that if you are battling voles that they will be helpful for you as well
the volking has been so sweet and they have given us a coupon for folks that are watching
so if you are interested in this you can check out the video description and i will have a
comment pinned at the top with their link and the coupon code that you can go and order these
for yourselves if you are local we will have these at the nurseries so without further ado one great
thing is of course they come in bags and they come in all different sizes of bags so whether
you're planting annuals or you're planting a tree they have a bag for you so anywhere from the minis
all the way up to like a 15 gallon and they'll come in these bags and depending on the size will
be depending on how many is in a bag but what's so great is this is the product so it is simply
a mesh bag and we're going to try to get a little bit of an up-close picture here
um it's a very soft and so you've got this this is like the i think the two to three gallon size
so what you do is you just take it and you open it up and it's just like a big bag
right it's like a pillow and you're just gonna roll down the side to begin with like that
okay now mama has already gotten her hosta here and this is one of her first hostas that was
discovered with the problem with the voles and so she dug it up and stuck it in this little
hanging basket container and so we are going to plant it for her today
i am using gloves just because you know me i like to garden with gloves because i've gotten so many
issues with hands but these bags are super super soft so you don't have to necessarily use those
use gloves to handle the bags the bag is not going to cut your hand so we've got the area right here
and of course you know mama lives underneath pine trees so the mulch that she uses for her garden
here is simply leaf mulch and the pine needles that just naturally fall from all of her trees
so we've got a little section and this is where the hosta was so we're just going to really simple
dig our hole and again the hosta was already here so it's already pretty good nice and loose
not going to have to worry about it too much here but looking at voles like if if you have
voles you know how just incredibly destructive they can be so i was doing a little research
for this video and they can multiply like crazy so if you have a mating pair of voles
they can produce like a hundred babies in a year and so that's just one mating pair so anyway
if you have voles oh yeah yeah yeah i told mom i said mommy you need to get a cat
but she has a dog and the dog is like two and if you have a two-year-old dog you know
probably introducing a puppy i mean a kitten is probably not the best thing but predators for
voles are owls your snakes all of those um really maybe you don't think
they're the best you know i know a lot of people don't like snakes so all i'm doing is taking off
the cocoa liner that was in this basket i'm trying not to destroy it so mama can use it again
okay here we go
all right so i had the hosta out of the container get my bag and open it up a little bit more mama
was so funny she was like jenny this is so much fun so i'm going to take a little bit of the extra
soil from around the edges of it so it makes sure it fits really well
into the bag yeah so snakes are great owls natural predators are really good
okay so we've got the bag we're gonna take the hosta plant it in here place it in here rather
and then mama was like jenny what you do is you take the bag and you shake it
so that you get can you see how the plant is really the root ball is at the bottom of the bag
so you shake it all right so she's in there really well now mama has been working these
beds for years so she has got beautiful soil in here so we're not going to amend it with anything
i mean she has just really worked it it is gorgeous so what we're going to do is just
if you had biotone you could go ahead and put biotone in here you're going to take the plant
and now you're just going to plant it as normal make sure that your bag though is up above
you don't want to bury the bag top in the soil because then the voles can just go over
and get into it then we're just going to backfill with the natural soil
get in there now with this bag it's so nice because the roots can still go out of the bag
and find all the nutrients that it needs if those voles are which they are still here they'll nibble
on those outside roots but not to the heart of the plant so it's not going to kill the plant at
all so make sure that you can see that your bag is up above like such and then mama
gave me instructions she said now jenny put some compost around the top so we're going to use our
land and sea and top dress just like we do with all the other things around the edge of the bag
get it in there
it is such a simple yet highly effective product um that it just if you have voles you
know how incredibly destructive they can be um so simple yet highly effective and then we're gonna
come back like i said and we're going to put her pine needles all around this sweet little hosta
is going to be so happy to get back in the ground where she belongs so that she can go back
to living her best life in mimi's garden and then of course mimi has her
little plant tag this is a drinking gourd so if you know that remember the drinking gourd
from the refrigerator this is what this is so again yes you do have a little bit of a lip of
the bag showing but who cares you still have your plant once this plant grows and you know that the
hostas and different plants will grow this will become hidden really quickly and this is a little
bit of a bag showing it's a much better option than all of your plants getting eaten so remember
if you were interested in this check both the video description and the pin comment i will have
the link and the coupon code that you can use a big huge thank you to the folks at volking for one
inventing such an amazing product and offering new viewers this coupon code as always thank you
so much for joining the creekside y'all have a great day we'll see you next video bye friends