Garden Centre

Thursday, August 21, 2008

August rain

I’m trying to find something good to say about this weather. It’s not easy! This summer has produced a lot of blackberries, which is about the only positive I can come up with. And I’m very fond of blackberries, so that’s nice.

On the other hand … slugs and snails! It’s rained at some point every day for the past week and the immediate response to rain seems to be the emergence of a plague of nasty crawlers, some with shells and some without: black ones, beige ones, ones with frilly orange edges, fat ones, thin ones … and all of them hell-bent on eating every leaf, flower and stem in my garden.

I try to be kind – and I’m squeamish, so I can’t do what a lot of more hardened gardeners do which is get out there with the secateurs or the heavy boots and wreak carnage. I also don’t use slug pellets because I worry about their effects on the environment, so it’s slug traps, slug-repelling soil and salt and copper barriers for me. And the salt barriers get washed away every time it rains, so that I have to go and sprinkle some more. It’s a thankless task, to be honest.

But the alternative is to have a garden full of bare twigs and skeletonised plants, so I went out today and bought a new bag of salt …

Labels: garden slugs, slugs and snails

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:09 PM

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