HAPPY DAYS!

Hi Lucy!

Welcome to blogland! How come you have to water things? Not fair - it's been pouring this afternoon! Forecast not hopeful for week either. Glad you are happy with your veggies - as I am with my flowers! Talk soon.

Hi Lucy, looks like you are doing really well for your first years production. Those tomatoes sound fun, if you like trying unusual veggies, try some heritage varieties, the advantage is in flavour, better value, more seeds per pack, and unlike F1's you can save the seed for next years planting.
Links on my sustainability blog

Hi Lucy

Your veggies look great, except...what are all those slug pellets about? There are so many eco-friendly slug control methods available, and pellets are just not safe for the environment.

OK so birds don't eat the pellets, but they, along with hedgehogs, frogs, toads, foxes, cats and dogs, will ingest the poisoned slugs.

Amphibians die quickly if they eat metaldehyde poisoned slugs - no frogs or toads = more slugs.

Thrushes, Blackbirds and all the tit family suffer greatly and we don't know the long term effect on their offspring but never forget DDT and the consequences of that.

Sorry to sound so judgemental but it is a real problem about which I am passionate. Enjoy your gardening.

Did you have an accident with the slug pellets , I have no objection to using them but about 5 pellets per plant is enough and are more likely to disappear fast and I don't believe that other things suffer they are unlikely to eat dead contaminated slugs anyway, animals have far more sense than we give them credit for.
If they were being killed off by slug pellets( which have been around for years) I am afraid there would be no toads, frogs, foxes(don't mourn their loss anyway)or anything else alive now.
Your plants look good too.

Hey there Lucy,
As someone fighting a loosing battle with slugs using eco-friendly and not-so-friendly methods I sympathise and have been tempted to surround my plants with pellets. The one thing that I have been told that I will always remember is that the attractant in the pellets outdo the killing force in them so they come for a free meal, an appetiser, before setting forth on the fabulous looking veggies. To be honest if I was a slug or even a passer by I might be tempted to have a nibble at that selection, they look great. Amazing work for the first year!

Hi, we started off with runner beans last year and ended up with a veggy patch of 23 diifferent types, so i hope you have got the bug. talking of bugs, I used nothing last year except the kids. they are only 4 and 6 now, but last year they loved searching the brassicas for caterpillars, and everwhere else for slugs, which we shamelessly launched into space with tennis racquets over our garden boundaries. i thought of drowning them in water or beer, but didn't even have the heart to do it.

Ooo, comment for David - I think the tennis racquets probably saw the end to them but slugs.. apparently.. can travel over a quarter of a mile to feed!

I do believe they can, joey! I should have done a scientific study on our disposal method, i.e. counting the ones with square mesh pattern that came back! Most of our slugs can be found in the morning slimbing up the house wall at the back door ( I do like to study their colouring), and all of these get scraped onto kitchen paper towel and put in the household refuse wheelie bin, where they have up to a fortnight of gorging on our refuse b4 they are carted away to landfill by the Council refuse lorry, where they may well (and probably do, survive, but not in our garden! Guess what? They NEVER touch our hostas, but haven't worked out why.