I’d given up any hope of getting anything eatable* out of the Very Smallholding this year, so you can imagine the delight when we discovered that the green stuff emerging from badly cut holes in the cardboard was not celandine and brambles but celandine and brambles and some actual potato plants.
Encouraged by this blistering success I planted our mid-season spuddies. These had been correctly chitted, by which I mean they’d got bored waiting in the bag and started growing, so they had something of a head start and we’re now several potato plants better off, which we can add to the three tomato plants that a neighbour left outside our gate one morning and which are actually producing tomatoes, and never mind that a certain small person who shall remain nameless has eaten the first red tomato.
The weed patch formerly known as the seedbed was also re-dug and planted up with leeks, kohl-rabi and something else I have yet to identify which the Greek grocer was throwing out, although they are currently in a life-and-death struggle with the slugs (note to self: take salt to garden tonight). All of which makes up for the fact that after carefully tending more than fifty spinach seeds to plants and then transplanting them, a total of one weedy yellow spinach plant is still alive.
*Except blackberries: we’ve lots of those.
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July 13, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Oldfool
It has gotten so hot here that my tomatoes are starting to burn. I have had all the tomatoes to eat that I want from four plants.
I got 5 potatoes this year but they were delicious. I considered small successes like this as small steps toward success. I am going to get serious about the potatoes.
We have tried to grow spinach for five years with complete failure. Mustard grows great.
July 14, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Andy in Germany
I’m trying to see the small successes in the same way: I’ve got 100% more potatoes than last year, for example.
More red tomatoes appearing every day. We had half a tiny tomato each on the weekend…
It’s very odd: I had no problem with spinach before which makes me think something different happened this year…
July 13, 2011 at 10:30 pm
the_big_smile
Hey, slugs are really nasty!
I finally gave up my plan to defeat them by collecting them in salt water.
Three weeks ago I used poison against them.
Now everything grows quite fine.
But OK, it is not autumn yet, so I don’t know yet, if there will be anything liek harvest…
July 14, 2011 at 4:07 am
annalee
Bring beer to attract the slugs pour it into small metal lids from glass jars or the like, leave them around on the ground and let them drown happy and numb. You’ll not feel too bad about it either since you are forced to drink a good portion of the beer; they don’t require much to expire. Next get Vodka for the blackberrys. Take glass canning jars, fill with berrys then drown them in Vodka. Screw the lid on tight, store somewhere you can give them a vigorous shake now and again. Next buy more Vodka and do it again and again. You’ll be slightly stewed from the beer and have dozens of jars of “the recipe” for when the weather turns cold and nasty to keep you warm. They also make outstanding holiday gifts too. The jars of recipe not the slugs, dead drunken slugs make awful holiday gifts.
July 14, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Andy in Germany
@ annalee: Bummer, there goes my cheap Christmas present idea… (but then again, how would you wrap them?)
Thanks for the tip with the beer though, it’s worth a try…
July 15, 2011 at 1:52 pm
the_big_smile
Hi annalee!
I tried the beer trick before.
But the slug seem to be clever. I had almost no drowned slugs. Instead my plants were still eaten!
I suspect, the slugs did it, like we often do it on saturday night: First go eating, then go and get drunk and then have a party!
I tried coffee, too. You can brew a really strong coffee. (Just poor a lot of ground coffee into boiling water.) After it cooled down, pour it onto your plants and use the wet powder to build a ring around each area or plant you want to protect.
Slugs don’t like caffein! And after the powder dried off, they don’t like to walk on it.
But you have to repeat the procedure every three or four weeks!
The poison was much easier. It worked within a few days.
But next spring I will try again to defeat them a natural way. And if this will not work, …….
But the recipe with the blackberries sounds good!
I think, I could grow blackberries all over the garden, make one bottle per day. If I drink one bottle of wodka per day, I surely won’t mind about slugs in the garden. Espacialy, because they don’t eat blackberries!
July 14, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Andy in Germany
@ big smile: I was hoping the slow worms / Blindschleicher would deal with them, but they don’t seem to be as effective as I’d hoped. The Kill mulch makes it easy for them as well. I’ll have to get manure on it as soon as I can.
July 15, 2011 at 2:18 pm
the_big_smile
I think it does not work, because many of the slug are migrants. They come from other countries and no one here wants to eat them!
The brown and redish naked slugs (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanische_Wegschnecke) are allmost never eaten by animals, that usually eat slugs. Only japanese ducks (Japanische Laufente) eat these slugs.
I found that some plants, especially lilies are a hidingplace for slugs. So I am removing all of them from the garden.
And mulch unfortunally is a good hidingplace for them, too.
But I will not remove the mulch from the garden.
In my killermulch (inspired by your article here) I applied the content from my compost-toilet on the cardboard, under the mulch. The charcoal is supposed to stay wet.