Lilies: Moles/voles eat Lily bulbs??, 1 by cathy166

cathy166 wrote:
To my understanding, moles and voles burrow under ground down to about 4-5 inches. I am also guessing that they do their dirty work during the warm weather months. Every year my lilies continue to thrive, and we seldom lose any. However, tulips that we plant in the fall (October) always come to bloom in the spring, and are dormant until the following spring. I am pretty certain that during the summer critters are eating the tulip bulbs because we lose so many tulips from year to year. Each fall I plant in excess of 100 new tulip bulbs in the same garden as the lilies. It was suggested to me to plant tulips deeper as well as to plant many other bulbs deeper than moles and voles tend to burrow.

It will be interesting to see if we lose any crinums or hymenocallis that were new this year. The orienpets that were new bulbs bloomed only 50%. The lilies that continue year after year are asiatics and orientals. The orientals are in the same garden as the vanishing tulips.

My new experiment is with container gardens. We dug up most of the bulbs in a garden invaded and infested with Houttuynia (chameleon plant). We did well with lilies in containers this past summer. We use 35 gallon containers on our deck which is sunny and provide good compost and lots of leaf mold. We keep them off the deck about 12-15 inches on plastic milk-type crates and make sure they have REALLY good drainage. Something like that should keep out moles and voles if that is convenient for you.

This lily was grown in a container together with about a dozen other lilies. I'll report in on how it winters.