What are you cropping?

[Wombat]

G'Day M3,

Mulch, mulch and more mulch! I use water from the water tanks and small amounts of greywater as well as some water from the mains, but only on Sunday and Wednesday!

Yeah the plastic house is used to pasturise compost and dry timber and not much else in summer - gets to about 60 deg C . I have a small shade "cupboard" that I use to raise seedlings in summer.

Nev

[Millymollymandy]

I should be learning from you then instead of moaning about how dry my soil is. The only problem with a new garden/veg patch is that we don't have enough compost/mulch yet, although we are trying and there are about 4 bins on the go at various stages of decomposition. I used grass clippings around my cabbages and carrots but the grass isn't growing much at the moment!

[ina]

I sometimes wish that I had no qualms about slug pellets. I could really do with a 24 hour slug watch around here - typical Devon summer warm and wet! My girls will not touch the slugs I offer them, the kids refuse to go around and snip them so theres me creeping around by torchlight like some weirdo - the neighbours gave up on me years ago.....

Lyds - I offer my slugs nice shelters and then go round and collect them from there. As they use the shelters during the day, I don't have to do my slug hunting at night.

Just use newspapers, folded over in not too thin wads (at least 8 sheets thick), and soaked in water. I lay them around the beds, along the paths, and go round at least every other day (theoretically ), lifting the papers and collecting them into a jar, in which they then die a horrible death . Sometimes I find whole families under one paper. Really makes me sad, breaking up these family gatherings...

The important thing is to keep the papers damp, so the beasties find them more attractive than lettuce leaves for their day of rest. And damp they are too heavy to go AWOL in windy weather, too. (Plus, we always hope that by reading papers slugs will learn a thing or two about how to treat your gardeners!)

By the way: By girls I hope you mean those of the feathered kind???

Good luck!

Ina

[Guest]

What a show-off that Nev is with all his produce!!
Hang on in there Ina with the broad beans, it's not long from flower to bean. I am soooo impatient and decided to harvest some BB's at the weekend, mmmn, their beautiful cosy almost cotton wool lined pods are lovely, we had them just boiled slightly with a wee knob of butter. yummy. They were vey small, must wait for the others to grow.

[greenbean]

That last guest was me, forgot to log in. Greenbean.

[Lyds]

Ina, thanks for the newspaper tip. I will try it today, I wonder if slugs prefer the Times or the local weekly?

Yes, by girls I do mean the hens......