I now had more time on my hands, so I started operation killing the moles again. I was beginning to get seriously annoyed with this little pests, as I just could not find them, and sometimes I followed a tunnel for meter upon meter, without a sign of any creeping mole, and I must have appeared quite crazy, creeping on my knees across the homestead! I had no idea what kind of animal I was looking for, and expected to at least find something! But it was like I had to do with some or other bally ghost gogga, and when I saw how my lawn started to just get brown and die, I turned to Google for information.
I never knew anything about a cricket mole, as everybody told me that the tunnels just below the surface, with others running underneath at about the depth of eighteen inches, was made by the creeper moles. I have tried everything on the market for moles, but nothing stopped the devastation of my plants.
I lost a shrub of about five feet also during the last few weeks, and am still very upset about my beautiful vine that was killed.
According to information on Google, the pests in my garden are cricket moles, and according to the description, that was exactly what I had to try and fight. A Cricket Mole, or Mole Cricket, is something like a grasshopper, and this thing has the ability to tunnel away all the soil from underneath your plants, and as they can go as deep as eighteen inches, they are really a threat to every thing with roots. But they are not the biggest threat to your plants, as the larvae poses just as big a threat, as they chew away on your plant roots. That is then why my grass is dying, as they live just below the roots.
According to the information I got, it is of absolutely no use trying to get rid of the crickets, as they can not be found, and very few people have actually seen one tunneling.
Today I became quite murderous, and decided to burn the dry grass that had died as a result of this pests, so I got the irrigation pipe ready in case the fire ran away, then emptied a bottle of turps all over, that because the matches nowadays are rubbish and don't burn long enough to light the grass, and after finishing the whole box without success, set the lot alight with my cooker's lighter.
Then I ran like a scared rabbit to open the water, as I couldn't open it before, the stream being very, very strong! All was going so well, and I stood watching with glee as the flames consumed the grass, hoping that the bally larvae were burning to cinders! It was quite hard to hold the thick hose, as the pressure is amazingly strong, of course because it is a steep fall from the dam to our plots. And then, just as all was going so well, the few clouds that were hanging above Haarlem for three days in a row, decided that they would play a bitty, and started shedding their drops! It was quite a hard shower, and it killed my fire, and I had to run to close the irrigation connection, and was a bitty wet and cross!
 But the rain was very welcome, as we don't get a lot of that, so I wasn't cross for long, thinking about my veggies that needed a good wetting!