To a certain extent, it makes us quite cheerful when a neatly piled heap in the garden in the morning reveals the traces of a mole. However, if a whole family of blind cave diggers was active at the same time, the fun quickly turned serious!
Moles are reluctant to be seen in the garden
And before we dig any further into the matter: Since these troublemakers are under nature protection, the means of getting rid of them are very limited. This means that no one has the right to harm a mole or attempt to kill it with poisonous substances. Even if medicine says that alcohol would be harmful, in this case it is not.
The smell of alcohol really gets on the nerves of moles, so much so that they leave their beloved labyrinth under your garden beds, and even avoid it in the future and for all eternity. Nevertheless, no one has to pour their entire stash of spirits into the corridors under the molehill. An empty bottle with what used to be a high-percentage liquor, which is placed upside down in the hole, is sufficient. The trick doesn't work with beer, by the way, it should be from 40 percent by volume upwards, then the smell of alcohol spreads quickly in the underground cave system.
Alternative methods of mole hunting
It is often reported on the relevant gardening blogs that a cloth soaked in alcohol leads to similar results. However, the radius of action for such an action is just three meters, so this method seems somewhat questionable. Garlic seems more promising there. However, the cloves have to be crushed so that the pungent, aromatic smell spreads widely in the cave passages. While the effectiveness of commercially available ultrasonic devices is very controversial, certain acoustic methods are still suitable for repelling particularly hardened moles. Examples of this are buried bottles that make a kind of whistling sound as soon as the wind blows into them, or the homemade pinwheels with squeaking noises that reflect the sound into the opening of the molehill with the help of buried metal posts.
By the way: If none of the household remedies mentioned work, your uninvited garden visitors are probably not moles, but water voles. And they, in turn, have a much weaker sense of smell, which means that other means have to be used.