Most of the people I work with are off today, so I stayed home too. On days I am home, I feed and water the chickens in the morning. This morning it was 40deg F out there. Suddenly, it's winter.

We have a gopher in the yard and garden again this year. Last time I started with trying to flood it out, but that didn't work because our soil absorbs too much. Then was a gopher chaser, which is a noisemaker that's supposed to annoy them and drive them away. It was also useless. Then was gassing. That didn't work either. I read later that when they smell the smoke, they just close off the offending tunnel and move away. Then was a trap. That worked last time. This year, Mr (or Ms) Gopher is smarter. He just pushed the trap out and plugged up the tunnel. Meanwhile, he continued to push up dirt piles around the yard and garden.

I don't know what else to try and he's tearing up the yard bit by bit.

While I didn't like the idea so much, I bought some gopher bait pellets and an applicator tool yesterday. The tool is like a syringe on the cable. You load the bait into the tube at the end of the cable, insert that end into a tunnel, then you press the plunger, which opens the end of the tube, releasing the bait underground. There were no fresh holes in the alley behind the house, so I had to put some in two of the holes in our yard. Mr Gopher is supposed to come by and find it.

We'll see if there are any more dirt piles.

The bait is underground, so the chickens shouldn't find it. A few months ago I found out they were very picky about their pellets. The pet store changed brands of chicken layer pellets. When I brought the new bag home, I didn't gradually mix in the new with the old to accustom them to the new stuff. They wouldn't eat it. I had to give them scratch (mixed cracked grains) and gradually mix the new pellets into that. Even if one of the poison pellets gets up out of the ground and they find it, hopefully they won't touch it.