Soil piles please help 🙏

[SoilEverywhere]

I’m turning to the collective wisdom of you gardening pros! I have four piles of dirt in close proximity to each other in the garden. If I remember correctly they turned up at this time of year last year and disappeared from June ish. They are around 30cm wide. Are they moles, ant hills, something else? I’d be grateful for any advice including any steps I should take to investigate further.

To me they look like mole hills.

Mole!

A blast! Thank you. I was really hoping they weren’t. Next question I guess is how do I get rid of the blighters! Has anyone got any tried and tested tips?

There was a previous mole thread:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/gardening/4690434-mole-hills-in-lawn

I hope it's useful.

It's their world too. Perhaps just be nice and tolerate them?

i have lots of mole hills in our garden and haven’t found a reliable way of getting rid of them. The soil is fantastic for using in pots, mixed with compost if you like, as it is lovely and crumbly. I suggest collecting it up and using it.

You can get mole traps from your local agricultural supplier or ask a local farmer's kid to do it.

Thank you for the suggestions so far and the thread link.

I'm genuinely jealous you have moles!! Personally I'd set a camera trap up to get photos!

They aerate & fertilise soil, eat invertebrates which are often pests and can attract other wildlife to your garden. They also don't stick around long so just wait and they'll disappear naturally.

Exactly! They are a part of our ecosystem.

Please don't harm them.

It will only be one mole OP - moles, or moldwarps where I come from, are notoriously anti social and solitary and each one will have a territory of up to an acre.
The males (boars) will fight to the death if they infiltrate one another's 'patch' and the boars and females (sows) only come together to mate.

As has been said, unless it is a pregnant sow about to construct a nursery, it will likely move on soon, and, yes, the fine soil you can get from the hills ( oontitumps!) is excellent for mixing with compost to make a seed sowing or potting mìx!

Where are you from, Hedgesfullofbirds, as OONTITUMPS has just become my new favourite word and I need to know its origins?

OP I agree with the others. Do nothing but be grateful for your garden diversity!

Mole traps are bleak. Snap traps are often used. Or crush traps. Or scissor traps. There is absolutely no justification for this, especially in a garden, in winter.

You're not actually going to kill then, are you? 😢

Using traps on these poor harmless creatures is appalling.

Sweep up the dirt piles, use the dirt elsewhere and be thankful humans haven't yet killed off every other species. They have a right to exist on earth, too.

Haha @TheSpottedZebra! I am in Somerset now, but originally from Gloucestershire, and it is a dialect worď (also very onomatopaeic!) which I picked up from my dad and some of the local farmers and gardeners😁

We had a mole in our small garden once. Christ Almighty, the mess had to be seen to be believed. We came back from a weeks' holiday to find that the path had been undermined, plants uprooted, and the lawn has never been the same since. It isn't just the little piles of soil that are the problem. They dig endless tunnels just under the surface, and these collapse underfoot as you unwittingly walk on them. Luckily for us it soon moved on, and never came back thank goodness.

Still, could be worse. Could be badgers. They rearrange things big time.

“Tump” means a small, usually not natural, hill. It’s applied to everything from mole hills to small solitary unnatural looking hills (eg Whittington Tump on the outskirts of Worcester). So presumably the “oonti” comes from some dialect word relating to mole … yes, googling confirms oont is a mole in Cotswolds and to the SW.

If you have moles it means you have good soil, lots of worms, so use it for your pots. You can pour a garlic solution down the holes just to hopefully make them move on.

I have a mole in my garden. I'm really excited about it tbh as neighbours on either side have plastic/concrete gardens

Dog is interested in the mole hills and spends plenty of time sniffing and marking the spot

My cat deals with the moles here. Waits for hours by their holes and fishes his arm down. He brings them into the house with their poor little spade hands flailing round

That's terrible. How shameful.