Tag Archives: slugs

Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails

Is that a carrot I see before me?

May was a busy but nerve-wracking month in the Midlife Garden.  After starting our cut flowers in storage boxes, they germinated quickly and copiously, but by April we face the challenge of what to do with all those healthy looking seedlings when they outgrew their boxes but looked a little too delicate to go outside.

We kept them protected in the greenhouse, with the lid off, but soon started getting leggy like a load of seedling Peter Crouches.   So, on 16th April, we took a gamble and planted them out in the raised beds, weeks before any theoretical last frosts.  They were not entirely unprotected, though, as we circled the little darlings with an array of glass to create a cold frame out of the raised bed.  And we kept a supply of fleece in case of frosts and kept a watchful eye on the weather forecast.

Incredibly the plants survived, mainly due to the unpredictable frosts not arriving.  Instead, it has been soaking wet, which has bought about the more predictable destruction at the hands (if that is the right term) of the invertebrates.

Every year I plant out wonderful, healthy seedlings, expecting an abundant crop, only to see them dismantled by slugs.  It is the horticultural equivalent of insanity – doing the same thing over again, with the same catastrophic result.  Normally, after the initial dismay and a couple of single malts, I am reasonably sanguine.  But not this year.  Oh no, not for the summer of 2024.  We need flowers.  And lots of them.  And on the 13th July.

We started looking up every means of delaying, defeating or destroying the slimy assailants.  We started with beer traps, which proved to be very popular, but when it rains the beer is diluted and, anyway, there still seemed to be quite a few teetotal slugs who avoided the alcoholic orgy to feast on the cosmos and sunflowers. 

There are conscientious gardeners online who have pseudo-scientifically tested all the usual remedies with varying results.  Eggshells, coffee grounds, gravel, sand, and talcum powder were partially or wholly ineffective – depending on the ground conditions.  But one method I had not come across was the use of brambles to create a barrier.  I have tried that on the sunflowers.  It is the second planting of sunflowers – the first ones ended up as stumps, alongside jam jars full of beer sodden slugs who did not make it to the sunflower feast – but, for now, the brambles seem to be working. 

Another way to rid your garden of slugs is nightly hunting expeditions down the garden.  It is a dispiriting sight, seeing a load of slugs heading across the grass like a bunch of post-apocalyptic Mad Max crazies hell-bent on destroying your crops.  The other night we came home late and found the Bells of Ireland covered in the slime balls.  The Bells are the potential signature flower of the summer – it will be first time we have managed to grow them to maturity if we actually achieve it, so the attack on them was the final straw. 

Now we have gone all medieval.  By which I do not mean hot oil, burning fat, slings, arrows or just a pike or two.  We have decided to use moats to keep them at bey since we do not think slugs and snails can swim.  And, so far, it seems to be working.

Veronica or Veronicastrum Virginicum?*

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Let ’em Dangle

I read a good article by James Wong in the Grauniad this weekend in which he gave his four top tips for beginners in the garden. I never feel like I have a great well of knowledge about gardening, although I have friends who see me as the expert in gardening, in relative terms that is, because I actually plant stuff, grow stuff and harvest or cut other stuff at the end of the process.  Although I still regard myself as a beginner in this big green-fingered world, reading James Wong’s article made me think that perhaps, in the horticultural educational ladder, I would most probably be in a position to now graduate from beginners’ to improvers classes.

James Wong says persistence is key – to not be put off by things dying on you.  Well, I think I do that.  There have been times when growing veg this summer has felt like a Sisyphean task – as successive batches of chard and peas have perished on the raised bed killing fields like ranks of yeomanry heading over the top to be mown down by slugs, sparrows or simple drought.  But I have rolled that metaphorical rock back up the hill and actually made it stick on occasion to reap the benefits in plentiful courgettes and beans, amongst other things.

Second piece of advice is to avoid worrying about weeds, which are simply flowers int the wrong place.   Using new raised beds has been a real treat this summer, especially with the dry weather so there has been little or no weeding to be done, but I have taken James’s idea to one extreme by allowing some of the random seedlings that emerged from the mudslide of the great greenhouse disaster to flourish in the warm indoor beds.  So I now have a sprinkling of zinnias and Ammi poking through the sweet peppers and tomatoes.  Why not?

Tip number three is simply to plant stuff in the ground and not bother with pots too much.  This is something I could take heed of as I am the worst helicopter parent when it comes to germinating and growing seeds.  I put them in lovingly sieved compost in individual seed trays and then check on them everyday – perhaps every hour – until they are poking through.  Then fuss over them even more watering and watching until they are bursting out of the trays and need to be potted on or planted out.  Then – to my amazement – when let loose from their molly coddled world of shop-bought compost and careful watering, planted out in the naked earth, they flourish.  Like grumpy teenagers living away from home for the first time they suddenly take flight, get on with growing up properly and become sensible members of the community.  So why not sow more seeds direct into the earth?  It might be what they really want.  Perhaps I’ll try that…

And finally Mr Wong advises using Latin names for everything.  Just get out and learn them he says:  no one really knows how Latin – a dead language – should be pronounced so no worries there.  And by using the correct Latin name you can be sure of what you are buying rather than vaguely describing the blue one of this or that flower, you can be pedantically specific.  But as someone whose school coerced him into taking Latin O-Level (My fault: I was one of only a few who actually revised for the exam in the second form) and subsequently scraped a C grade at sixteen (a “4” in today’s exciting GCSE grading), I have never been keen on the language even in horticultural use.   Until recently I would have assumed that streptocarpus was a fish flavoured throat lozenge.  But I will perhaps try the Latin way more often.  Does that include more gesticulation when I speak, suffering wild swings of emotion and using the horn on my car with impunity?  If it makes the broad beans grow, I’ll give it a shot.

I may not have been happy with being made to do latin as a schoolboy, but if things don’t go as planned, it is better to laugh than to cry.   As a latin student might have said of my designated superiors at the last educational establishment I left:

“Eos si iocus non possint pedicabo…”

 

“What a Good Year for the Courgettes…”
Peas in our Time?
The Other Side of Summer
Indoor Zinnias…
…Accidents will Happen
This Year’s Models
Pump it up…Jersey Devil
Tamp the Dirt Down

 

*With apologies to Elvis Costello

The First Lift

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Potatoes – Swift and early. But where have all the flowers gone?

These are the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon once sang. The garden is starting to produce, and all the fastidious work sowing seeds, potting on, planting out, weeding, hoeing and slaughtering snails, begins to pay off.

One of the key moment is the lifting of the first root of New Potatoes. It is something that was treated with due pomp and ceremony by The Old Man and required the type of careful prodding and inspection one would normally expect only of a midwife.  The Old Man would have counted the days since planting, checked the growing conditions and attempted to calculate the exact best day to start digging.  But he traditionally only planted one type of potato (probably Wilja or Desiree), meaning that those dug in June were new potatoes, anything after that were main crop.

For my part, I am always seduced by the choice on offer at Pennard Plants Potato days so I buy various types for different end products.  But every year I am unsure about when they are likely to be ready.  The sages of the internet gardening fraternity say you need to start harvesting when the potatoes have stopped flowering, but this May / June has been so dry they seem to have barely blossomed.  And this has been a very different this year for other reasons:

  1. The potato patch (and veg patch) is only a few strides from my back door in the new property
  2. Due to a lack of supply we had to go for Swift first earlies instead of the usually reliable Belle de Fontenay
  3. In an even more radical break with normal procedures, earthing up has been done not with earth, but with grass clippings, thanks to reading an article by Alyce Fowler.

So the timing of when the first spuds would be ready was even more of a guessing game than normal.  However, the three variables noted above were more likely to help rather than hinder.  Point one makes it less time-consuming to check them, point two suggested that the they would be ready earlier (or else why give them a name synonymous with fast) and point three, after some initial misgivings, was the most beneficial of all.  With the dry weather, I was able to simply lift a portion of grass clippings to expose the golden orbs that indicated the potatoes were ready.

And so we enjoyed our first potatoes of the season along with the first kale of the year too.  The kale should have been ready much earlier, but it was a victim of unknown assailants – like the peas and salad.  But, on the whole, there is enough greenery to suggest a good growing season beckons.

Snug under their blanket of grass clippings
The First Root – ready for prepping