It’s a ‘soft’ day here – Structures in the Vegetable Garden

My Vegetable Garden (4th June 2012)

So here we are three months after my first video and it’s starting to look like a ‘proper’ vegetable garden once again. All the frames and structures are in place with seeds, seedlings and plants growing in most of the beds now.

An insect eye’s view of the herbs

We’re picking and harvesting herbs, broad beans, lettuce, spinach and strawberries and with the warm weather a couple of weeks ago, at last we’re all noticing growth in everything. It’s been slow this year with the cold night-time temperatures causing many people I speak with problems. Even the heated benchdidn’t help us much here – my chilli seedlings are still tiny! The hope now is that the potatoes don’t succumb to blight when vegetable growers have only just got over the frost damage.

Slugs have been the most destructive pest here to date. I’ve tried egg shells (not bad), coffee (seems to deter them), organic slug pellets (see the photo on last month’s post – they were rubbish) and NemaSlug (think it was too hot for them and despite watering, the soil just not wet enough). I’m now trying a sample of Slug GoneWool Pellets around a couple of bean plants to see how they fare.

The Greenside Up Garden – 5 June 2012

The best method I’ve found by far has been going out to the garden and picking the slugs off the grass surrounding the beds or even the seedlings themselves. I know Jane Powers suggested in her recent Irish Times article that the kindest way to dispose of slugs is by snipping them in half with scissors but I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to do it. So into a bottle of hot water it is for them 🙁 maybe my nerves will strengthen in time and I’ll try the more humane method soon.

If you have any questions, observations or comments on the methods I’m using here please feel free to ask/say. Feedback is good and I might learn something!