Delayed by a trip to the USA, I have only just achieved my annual planting of a few salad leaves and runner beans. My little garden is more or less organic and is a haven (or should I say heaven) for healthy, hungry slugs and snails. When my grand daughter Z comes to stay, we usually hand pick a glass jar full in a few seconds each morning, and she likes to sit over her breakfast cereal watching them escape over the table, leaving their slithery slimy tracks on my rather beloved Provencal tablecloth.
Once I maintained a snail "Siberia" at the back of the garden: my garden rubbish heap surrounded by sharp gravel and eggshells. It wasn't effective. There were many escapes. Nowadays, we have a special brown wheelie bin for garden weeds and cuttings, and a black compost bin for kitchen vegetable waste and shredded paper etc. The snails go into the brown wheelie bin where I hope they gorge on tender green weeds of which I have a rich and tasty supply, and manage to escape on some municipal processing ground to enjoy a life of exile.
My main objection to snails and slugs is their rash preference for my vegetables. To repel them, I have sunk plastic window boxes into my vegetable patch, and sown all my tender seeds within these boxes. The finishing touch is to anoint the rims of these boxes with a thin layer of Tiger balm. Surely this should be a sufficient hint? After all, Tiger balm must heal and nurture tigers, and surely slugs and snails would respect tigers, even if they have no respect for me. We shall see.
My eco score for today:
Weeds pulled out by hand: 1 brown wheelie binful: +++
Temptation to lay out slug pellets resisted: +
White cotton sheets and white towel washed at 65 degrees (they looked miserable and I need them to be FRESH and white): - - -
Total score for today: +
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