Ninja slugs??

I knew it was too soon to celebrate geting rid of the slugs and snails in the garden.

I had been out collecting slugs and snails the night before as usual, and struggled to find any at all, even when carefully folding back leaves to check, and looking down the back of the potato sack that is next to the fence where I can usually find a few nice specimens to be given enforced swiming lessons in a bucket of salty water.

I went out the next morning to do my usual round of the beds before work to find that two of my romanescue broccoli had been munched, one almost completely, along with a large part of the foliage in one of my potato bags and odd bits of the kale.



 

                              

Munched!!






I even found a giant snail on the inside of the door to my blow-away greenhouse where it had nearly reached the peppers and aubergine on the top shelf - at least my plan of putting them high up has prevented them coming to more harm.

I am at a loss as to where these have come from - for the past couple of weeks I have been patrolling the garden at dusk and after every shower to collect and kill any snail and slug I can see - the death count must be in the high hundreds by now.

When I started harvesting them I was getting some really impressive specimens up to six inches long, but recently I have been hard pressed to find anything over an inch, but suddenly all the big boys are back, and they are hungry!  They must be Ninja Slugs - hiding until I have gone past then leaping out onto my brassicas.



Looking on line as to how other gardeners control their slug population I came across a product called Nemaslug, which is a naturally occurring microscopic worm which infects the slug, causing it to bury itself and die. You get a pack of inert powder that contains millions of these worms which you mix with water and simply water the entire garden with it  These things then actually go looking for the slugs in the soil, which appealed to my sense of justice - if the slugs and snails go looking for my veggies then why should I not have a small army of microscopic worms on my side to do the same to them.

I promptly ordered a pack big enough to cover 40 square metres - my front garden just happens to be about 35 square metres so I will even have enough left to treat around the blowaway in the back too, if I am careful.

The product wasn't cheap - including postage it was just over a tenner, but as it is supposed to give six weeks protection per application I think that will be a reasonable outlay for no more eaten seedlings

Pop  Bottle Mini Cloches

As a short-term measure I have used 2L pop bottles as improvised cloches to protect the remaining obviously tasty romanescues - I have also cloched up the casualties, just in case they survive.

If they don't, I have a couple of spare plants in the blow-away to replace them.

The Nemaslug arrived on Saturday, but I didn't have time to apply it then so it looks like that will be a job for today.  I never thought I would be involved in biological warfare, but needs must.  At least it is totally natural, which makes me feel a bit better about it all.

On a happier note, it looks like I may get some apples on my dwarf trees this year.  Both trees flowered well, and it looks like there are signs of the fruit starting to swell.  Not sure what to call the bit that is swelling, I shall have to look it up later, unless anyoone out there knows what it is?

One plant had loads of flowers, but it looks like very few have set, whilst the other variety only had about half a dozen but virtually all have set.  I left pollination to the bees again this year, but next I think I will have to try some manual pollination with a small paintbrush to see if I can improve the setting rate.

The dwarf pear, however, still hasn't even had a single flower, and not even any signs of trying to.

Never mind - time to go and rain some watery death from the skies on my slugs,