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| Love these double pale pink poppies, still coming up each year from seed brought from my last garden, 10 years ago. |
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| A David Austin rose called Queen of Sweden |
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| A new delphinium I am trying to protect |
Sophie's wedding is this month and I realise that even if my garden was bursting at the seams with flowers it still could not provide enough to fill 80 jam jars, make 10 buttonholes and bouquets for bride and bridesmaids. I have to buy some of the flowers and find greenery and the occasional wild flower in the local hedgerows. It's fun as well as challenging!
Last night, armed with my torch and thickest rubber gardening gloves I looked for slugs. Shop customers tell me they cut them in half but I couldn't do that. Dozens of them had congregated on one poor daisy plant, and I put them all into my lidded pot. I found the odd slug on other plants but luckily the delphiniums were slug free (so far). I put wool pellets around my prized plants because slugs don't like to slither over wool apparently but it doesn't kill them. That seemed a humane deterrent. However puting them in a pot with the lid on wasn't humane and if slugs had any sort of a brain they might have preferred the quicker fate of being cut across the middle...
Today I was watching the birds in the garden taking food from a neighbour's bird tray and flying down to eat it in peace in my garden. I notice that lots of shops sell 'fat balls' to feed the birds all the way through the year.
I remember when feeding the birds was something you did in cold winters to get the birds through when natural food was in short supply. But natural food is plentiful right now. Slugs and snails are ideal food for larger birds like thrushes and blackbirds and the soil is full of worms and insects. Perhaps we have so many slugs in the garden right now partly because birds have got used to having most of their food laid out on bird tables for them and it seems like too much effort to search soil and plants for more 'natural' food...
Last night, armed with my torch and thickest rubber gardening gloves I looked for slugs. Shop customers tell me they cut them in half but I couldn't do that. Dozens of them had congregated on one poor daisy plant, and I put them all into my lidded pot. I found the odd slug on other plants but luckily the delphiniums were slug free (so far). I put wool pellets around my prized plants because slugs don't like to slither over wool apparently but it doesn't kill them. That seemed a humane deterrent. However puting them in a pot with the lid on wasn't humane and if slugs had any sort of a brain they might have preferred the quicker fate of being cut across the middle...
Today I was watching the birds in the garden taking food from a neighbour's bird tray and flying down to eat it in peace in my garden. I notice that lots of shops sell 'fat balls' to feed the birds all the way through the year.
I remember when feeding the birds was something you did in cold winters to get the birds through when natural food was in short supply. But natural food is plentiful right now. Slugs and snails are ideal food for larger birds like thrushes and blackbirds and the soil is full of worms and insects. Perhaps we have so many slugs in the garden right now partly because birds have got used to having most of their food laid out on bird tables for them and it seems like too much effort to search soil and plants for more 'natural' food...
1 comment:
I'm lucky Jenny, in that I can leave a collection of slugs for Frank to deal with! 😉
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