I've been gardening for years, and thought I knew all the tricks. But gophers continue to defeat me at every turn. Grow in raised beds, they say! Underwire the beds! Sounds simple, but here's how gophers have continued to one-up me.
First of all, raised beds with underwire - makes sense, right? You'd think that's the perfect solution, but in my yard the gophers have managed to get into my beds. That defeats the purpose, and gives them ready access to your lovely produce. Some words of wisdom:
Make sure you get the right sized wire. You might think chicken-wire is good, but it's actually big enough that gophers can fit through it. And it's thin, so rusts more quickly. Solution - use hardware cloth. The thicker wire and tight squares won't allow gophers through.
Secondly, how to fasten the wire. If you run the wire a few inches up the inside of the beds, after years of use the wood and wire decay enough that the gophers can push their way through and tunnel up through your beds. Solution: run the wire all the way up the inside of the bed to the top, and fasten it there. It will show, but the lack of contact with soil should add years to its life.
Third, gophers will "build stairs" to climb up into your raised beds. If you leave their mounds unattended, they will build their own stairs. Or, they will happily climb up trailing plants. Solution: keep mounds cleared out and keep trailing plants up in the beds.
Even if you keep the gophers out of raised beds, crops such as squash and pumpkins tend to lay all over the place. Left on the ground unattended, the sneaky gophers will tunnel into the fruit that lays on the ground. In many situations, they do it from the bottom so you can't even see they are doing damage until it's too late. One year I had a perfectly good looking pumpkin, but when I went to harvest it, it turns out it was literally a pumpkin shell full of dirt! Solution: put your fruit on boards to prevent their access from beneath.
My solution is trapping gophers using cinch traps. I prefer not to use poison since that may affect pets or other wildlife such as owls that eat gophers, and these traps work well on gophers. https://cinchtraps.com/ You should trap not just in your garden but in the surrounding area. One person I know has trapped his entire five acres!
While I'm not that ambitious, I have learned not to attract them with my compost pile. One year when turning over my compost I discovered it filled with gopher tunnels. They were in there having a good old time eating all the discarded produce. Now my compost bins have an underlayer of concrete stepping stones to prevent access from below.
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