Our garden’s alive 24/7
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Cottage tales | 13 comments
The front door opens into the cottage kitchen and from the same room the back door reveals the garden. In summertime it’s always a wrench closing the garden door when it gets too dark to see.
I keep it open for as long as possible. I’ve even been known to cook supper wearing a thick fleece. Then I can enjoy the birds and, as the light gradually fades, watch the colours in the garden slowly drift and fall asleep.
Some summers have us eating by the pond, wrapped in blankets, serenaded by the owls and the rustles in the undergrowth that indicate that hundreds of small nocturnal creatures are stepping out. Apart from the battalions of slugs and silent snails, there are mice and hedgehogs and the occasional rat. In fact, the night time cast in the garden is on a par with a Cecil B. DeMille epic. When the cast is sleeping off a long night shift, I often marvel at the damage in the morning. No empty wine bottles here just the remnants of plants and fresh, deeply scented trails that have the Min Pins rushing through the shrubbery.
I discovered that slugs had stripped bare six tender sprouting broccoli plants overnight. These are some of the 24 and are special plants grown for us by John Coe. They are netted and nurtured from the time that they are planted to the grand April harvest and festival of chomping.
I considered driving to the garden centre to buy replacements as I searched for my slug traps. John Coe gets quite worked up by people who don’t look after his plants.
“He had the cheek to ring me a week later. Not to thank me, mind you. All he said was,
˜Pigeons have stripped them bare. Can I have some more?’
No chance.”
The problem is that I don’t know whether it’s purple or white sprouting this year. If I get the colour wrong, John will spot in an instant. It’s a 50/50 gamble that I will have to take. When I replaced the torn tenrils of baby cabbage plants one year, we were all surprised to see Savoy cabbages had mysteriously infiltrated the rows.
I baited some of my slug traps with beer and the rest with milk. The latter works like a dream (once the milk goes off) but they also attract the Min Pins who have been known to dig under the nets. Frogs seem to be enticed too, sometimes I lift a lid and a pair of small round eyes peers up unblinking from the milky depths.
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Hi Pamela
You put the hair in something very light like the leg from a pair of tights and the wrap it around the treasure to be protected.
There are deer on two sides of our garden but as yet not in ours. So I’ve heard how to get rid of them.
Kate(uk) – I’ve been trying to work out what you mean by putting human hair “around them”. Do you mean on the ground round them? Attached in some way? Wouldn’t the wind just blow it away? Just trying to clarify this as my sister has a lovely tall single twig in her garden that used to be a sapling until the deer found it one night.
To get the deer away from your trees- put some human hair around them, ask your hairdresser for some sweepings. I heard this on Gardeners Question Time, a friend tried it on her roses and it worked.Smelly old T shirts are good too!
It’s probably not much help now, but maybe for future years. A very good friend of mine runs a small cottage garden and nursery in Worcestershire, and she has the most beautiful Hostas. I asked her how she manages to keep them so immaculate and she told me her story. She’d visited Highgrove, and like many others was amazed that an organic garden could have such perfect slug-free hostas. So she asked the gardener, and he happily shared his secret: start in February with organic slug pellets (as thats when the slugs and snails start to breed), and surround the hostas with a mixture of shells and gravel. She adapted it slightly and uses a seaweed compost instead, somehow the residual salt seems to do the job of persuading the blighters that it’s not a nice place to go. Too late for your poor broccoli this year, Fiona, but perhaps worth thinking of next year!
Hi – I sympathise about the slugs and the woodpigeons – we have deer eating our newly planted fruit trees. Very frustrating!
Very interesting, I have never heard of using milk for slugs, which is so intriguing. I will be giving it a try soon.
My problem is large Woodpigeons- they crash land in the flowerbeds and break everything in sight. Four huge allium flowerheads broken off yesterday, campanula flower shoots the night before.Slug damage pales into insignificance in comparison, these woodpigeons can flatten a couple of square feet of plants in one go…though mind you, if slugs were the size of pigeons they could eat a whole garden in a night!
i put down nematodes about six weeks ago, which did very well to kill off the initial flush of slugs, although it hasn’t worked for snails. since then i’ve just been slug hunting every night, armed with a spray bottle with a solution of household ammonia (1 in 3 – ammonia:water) in it and a torch. it kills the slug/snail straight away and the bodies give a little nitrogen back to the soil. i don’t know whether its harmful to other animals, but i’m fairly sure i don’t have a hedgehog in the garden and i keep the dog well away from the bodies. so far it seems to be working – much better than last year anyway! i suspect where slugs are concerned that its lots of methods, rather than just one, so i may get out my beer traps soon..
Thanks Fiona, I just recently tried using slug traps, used some beer. Might try the milk. But have noticed we seem to have more frogs this year in the garden.
Me too. Went up to the plot last night and found half our broccoli had been denuded by slugs – it has to be slug pellets up there (wildlife friendly ones) because we’d have to dig a trench and put in guttering and fill it milk or beer to keep the slugs off the beds. And then we’d have drunken foxes or bellyaching feral cats to contend with too ….
I wish we had a hedgehog up there.