Those terrible voles!

This first photo shows a little bit of the vole damage next to the Improved Canadian Choke Cherry on the West side of the house.  They eat the tender part of the grass leaving the tops as mulch.  There are trails all over the yard.  The best thing to do is uncover all those spots.  I use a tine rake and put all that grass in the garden or flowerbeds.  Then the tiny bits of grass trying to grow again can have air and water.  I'll show more photos of that in another post. 

When I was adding in the arrows I felt like the blue Genie in Aladdin saying, "Here, here, here, here, here, here, and here." Did you have Vole damage this year?

Here is a close up of the base of the tree.  It's not cleaned up yet, but will be as soon as I get the curtain rods put up downstairs.

And the other tree.

 And the last Choke Cherry tree.  It is part of a large flowerbed that I haven't done much with yet.  It looks much better since I tilled it.  I will till it again when it dries out a little more.  Then it will look much better.  I am going to fill in with river rock mulch here.  You can see the voles were busy here.  I'm almost terrified of the upper hill.  It's going to be a lot of work raking.  I'm already thinking having it power raked would be very beneficial.

In this photo you can see that most of west square foot garden is free of snow.  It's still frozen solid but doesn't take long to thaw it out.  I can hardly wait to plant.  It will be filled mostly with Little Finger carrots this year. I only grew a few last year but they are my absolute favorite carrot.

I will be designing a cover for part of my other square foot garden so I can grow broccoli and a few other items so they'll be safe from bugs.