Garden update
After the torrential rain of the past month or so, we finally got out into the garden today to do a bit of tidying up. We’re incredibly lucky not to be among the people having to leave their homes because of flooding. We live on a slight hill, and are a reasonable distance from the nearest river, so we’ve been very lucky. The garden has not escaped quite so lightly.
The slugs seem to have had a population explosion in the damp weather. Most of our smaller seedlings (bunching onions, beetroot and salad crops) just disappeared overnight, with only a tell-tale silvery trail to reveal the culprit. After a very promising start, our ‘three sisters’ bed (beans, sweetcorn and squashes planted together — a technique employed by the Iroquois), is down to two rather sickly sisters existing on income support rather than each other’s strengths. The squashes started out wonderfully, but despite every organic anti-slug measure we could devise, we would look out each morning and find another healthy plant reduced to a chewed stump. The sweetcorn got a bit munched as well, and with the lack of sun, it hasn’t grown a great deal. This in turn means that the beans don’t have much to climb up. I was recounting this tale of woe over the garden wall to our elderly neighbour the other day, and he said incredulously, “Didn’t you put slug pellets down?”. He’s probably right: despite my aversion to putting poisons down, it’s probably the only thing which might have stemmed the slimy tide.
