Today started out with a nice, mild, sunny morning with barely a wind, but then this afternoon the wind picked up and it started to snow. *sigh*
-And then as I was leaving the office the snow turned to rain… *sigh*
But: My dahlia seed order arrived today! That makes up for the weather, at least in part. *YAY*
(I also received a text from my optician that my new prescription sunglasses are ready to be picked up, but given that the weather forecast hasn’t a sun in sight before possibly Saturday, I decided that it’s not urgent to pick those up.)
I may try to limit myself (only four different packets of dahlia seed, and each packet will be split evenly between my mother and me), but at heart I think I might be a seed hoarder; I feel like buying all the seeds I can get my hands on – flowers, vegetables, perennials, annuals – even though I know there’s no way I will have the time – or space – to prepare enough beds for them. So I’m trying to make a list of what I need, and I guess I only really NEED to buy beans, and maybe some peas in case the seed I collected last year isn’t viable.
Last year I had three kinds of beans – or rather, I had two and the slugs had the low yellow beans before they had even reached 5 inches – and this year I think I will restrain myself to two kinds. I need to have normal French climber beans, and then perhaps runner beans, broad beans or some other slightly more rustic bean type. (The slugs stayed away from the climbing beans last year, perhaps because I sowed a row of marigolds between the two rows of beans; I shall repeat that this year and hope that it was the scent of marigolds that kept the slugs away. I collected plenty of seeds last year, so there should be enough to sow a row in each of the vegetable patches.)
I’ve already bought brassica seeds (radishes, kohlrabi and kale), so basically that will be my vegetable garden this year. I will need to watch the slugs, though, which is very difficult when I can only get up to the garden every one or two weekends… Slug pellets WILL be used, though of the sort that is approved for organic farming and is supposed not to harm any other animals than gastropods. They contain only wheat flour and iron phosphate, and I hope they are as harmless as they claim to be – except of course for the slugs.
(One summer evening shortly after we bought the summer house I collected – and killed – 179 Iberian slugs, a highly invasive species of slugs that seem to have a much greater appetite for plants – and procreation – than our native slug species… They are now endemic throughout Denmark and like cool, damp areas like, say, our garden! Wikipedia says: “The main reason behind problematic invasions of gardens by the Spanish slug is that it has adapted to a dry climate, where most eggs will dry out before hatching. The slug lays hundreds of eggs so that at least some may hatch. In the less dry regions of Northern Europe and Britain, the constraints of drought do not limit reproduction to the same degree.”)
(God, I have a lot of parentheses in this post!)
Anyway… Where’s my spring? And my weekend so I can get up to the garden and ger cracking with all the stuff that needs doing, including digging out a new bed from the lawn, extending the Ambitious Border and getting the raised vegetable beds into some sort of shape before the growing season starts!
I also lay those organic pellets and I feel awful every time I do it, but we can’t just leave the snails and slugs – they can destroy a bed in days!
I lave Dahlias too – I look forward to watching your grow. Mine are not doing so well. The plants are lush and full, but with few flowers.
Last summer there was one point when I gave up; I saw clusters of slugs hanging from the flower-buds of my 2-meter high sunflowers…
So pellets it is!
I think my dahlias will be okay if they survive the slugs; the new bed for them will be South-South-West, so nice and warm, and I will sow some marigolds between the dahlias. They might be shaded by the dahlias and decide not to flower, but even the foliage has that distinctive smell and I’m hoping that might help keep the slugs at bay. It’s worth a shot, surely…
I think I am a bit of a seed hoarder too…I am not sure I will have enough room for all I want to plant this year…what a nasty invasion of a pest…much like the Japanese beetles we dela with here that eat everything in sight…here’s to warmer days
A bit of seed hoarding is probably inevitable when you love plants, but once we know our addiction we can try to be realistic about it…
And yes, they’re highly annoying, not to mention rather disgusting. Don’t walk barefoot in my garden late in the evening or first thing in the morning, as you will almost inevitably step on one or more of these dastardly creatures.
I gave up using slug pellets even the organic ones. I usually collect them (nothing better to do it would seem) in a bucket of salt water. I have a Norwegian friend who swears she goes out with a pair of scissors…. and someone else made a sort of slug soup and sprayed it on the plants…yuk!
As for buying seeds, don’t be too restrained will you?
Collecting the slugs is not really an option, since I only spend every other weekend in the garden and that won’t do it – at least not alone. I do take the odd evening stroll in the garden with a bucket and a small trowel, but I also need something to control them when I’m not around.
The scissor thing is quite common here in Denmark, too, but too gross for me to even contemplate. I collect them in a bucket with a little bit of water, and then when I’m done I boil up a large pan of water and pour over them, since this is a quicker kill than the salt.
Slug soup? I doubt that would work on the Iberian slugs, since they also eat their own dead… (Which is why I throw my dead slugs in the small stream behind the house so they can be washed out into the fjord and maybe feed some fish or whatever, rather than lie around in my garden as a feast for their ilk.)
Those slugs sound horrible! Good luck with your dahlias, and your vegetables. I am going to try growing some flowers from seed for the first time this year. Keeping my fingers crossed!
The slugs can do quite a lot of damage overnight, so imagine when there’s a couple of weeks between tending to the garden… This year I might also start using beer traps to catch them, though it seems a waste of beer.
And good luck with your seeds, too! It’s quite satisfying to see beautiful, large plants that only a couple of months earlier were tiny seeds, and of course it’s a lot easier on the budget than buying plants!
the slugs sound gross! I was going to suggest beer traps my Dad used them for snails and I’ve heard they work on slugs too, interested you say the boiling kills quicker than salt I have occasional used salt, I’m lucky as the thrushes take a lot of the slugs but I don’t think we have them to the degree you do anyway, one thing I read for keeping them off new plants though it doesn’t kill, put some sand around the base as the slugs don’t like crawling through it, it hurts their skin, I find it helps a lot,
I hope the weather improves for both of us soon, Frances
Sand and sawdust are both in my considerations. (The sawdust should do the same trick as the sand in creating an unpleasant surface for them to slug along on.)
The salt works because it essentially dries them out, but this is not instantaneous the same way that a large amount of boiling water is. I doubt if they’re really all that sentient, but I do feel better killing things as quickly and humanely as possible. (Okay, the slug pellets is a form of slow poisoning, but they’re my only option when I’m not around the garden on a daily basis.)
Birds, hedgehogs and the like all take a fair bit of slugs, but considering that even one slug that survives the winter will turn into 2-400 new slugs the next year, you can’t rely on nature to regulate this invasive species. There simply aren’t natural predators that are gluttonous enough to consume these large numbers. (I hope your island remains free from this particular type of slugs, especially as I’m sure they’d thrive in your damp climate as they do here…)
Soren, I’d never heard of this slug until reading this post, the large numbers reproducing it’s sounds like a nightmare, I think I too would use pellets in your position, good luck, Frances