Ria you can take some comfort from the very fact that you have moles as these furry gentlemen's presence is a function of a good working soil ecosystem, i.e. that you have essential earth worms. They also eat slugs and several genera of invertebrates which can do serious damage to certain types of plants such as Lilium. Look on the bright side, consider them as being on your pay role, they are not a threat quite the reverse but the worse you can say is they are sometimes inconvenient. Typically man wants and man expects but sometimes man doesn't respect. Learn to love your moles, they don't have any specially housing requirements, need looking after, as you found you can go away for weeks on end and they are there to greet and reassure you on your return. There is one further element of course, certain genetically deficient men especially, get as mad as hell when their lawn gets visited by moles. The hard facts are that men, unlike women, do not have the gene for grass cutting but women do. All biological rules have exceptions as I tell our visitors to the gardens here and you would be astonished by the degree to which women agree that their men have problems cutting the lawn grass, the first is the guy who cuts the lawn in vertical/parallel stripes.....he needs to get out a bit more, then there is the guy who cuts the lawn in checkerboard fashion....... he is putting off going in to talk to his wife; and finally there is the guy who cuts the lawn in erratic meandering ways..........that's a guy who is alcohol dependent and needs help. Grass and by implication lawns are required by gardners to be fed into one end of a cow in order to raise the fertility of the garden from the other end. I challenge anyone to find fault with this rational! Iain -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. We are a community of 5.8 million users fighting spam. SPAMfighter has removed 42141 of my spam emails to date. Get the free SPAMfighter here: http://www.spamfighter.com/len/ The Professional version does not have this message