29/01/2026
Often considered a nuisance because of their molehills, there are many potential solutions offered online for removing moles from your garden; poison, humane traps or ultrasonic devices, designed to dissuade them from a particular area.
Moles, however, actually provide a lot of benefits in the garden. They feed on garden pests such as slugs and snails, and aerate the soil as they dig their tunnels. So, when we discovered them in our new garden, we decided to try something else – accepting their presence and seeing if we could make the garden work for us all.
Moles are solitary animals. They each create a network of tunnels in which they live and feed, and they will defend this territory from any other mole that comes too close. (This is why killing or removing moles isn’t a simple solution – another mole will simply move into the territory.) When you see a cluster of molehills in your lawn, it therefore means you have just one mole, not a whole army.
The hills are generated as the moles dig, to remove the excess dirt from their tunnels. Once created, the moles will live happily within their network as long as food is plentiful and their tunnels are undisturbed. If something collapses a tunnel, the mole will set about fixing it, usually creating another hill.
We soon discovered that every time we ran over an inhabited area with our ride-on mower, hills would appear the next day. We were obviously disturbing the ground underneath. So, in an area where we were trying to cultivate a flat lawn, we switched to using a hand-mower only. If any hills did appear we carefully scraped away the soil, taking care not to push it back down into the hole.
Within a couple of weeks, the hills had stopped and the mole was living happily below us, showing that it might take a bit of extra work but it is possible to work alongside these little creatures, so that you can both enjoy the garden!
