Organic Slug Control

When I went out last night to take some pics of the new Almond trees we’ve got I noticed that the wet weather seemed to have woken up a whole cohort of slugs. It was incredible – I collected this pot-load of slugs in about five minutes, just by strolling around the edges of the lawn, and having a look at their usual favourites. To have an up-front and gruesome look at them just click on the pic to get the full-size effect.

If I was being scientific about it I’d claim that this Hosta was planted as a Companion Plant to decoy the slugs from other things we wanted to protect. However the reality is that slugs and snails just love Hostas, and this is the result:

I got three slugs off this one plant – you can even see two of them in the pic – the one in the bottom left was over six inches long!

Having collected them all, how was I going to get rid of them? I opted for the tried and tested method of chopping them into little bits with the trowel. It’s a lot more face-to-face than sprinkling them with salt or covering them with boiling water, but for the sake of my Karma, I thought a quick, clean death was best.

Not sure if I’ve made a great dent in the local slug population, but there certainly weren’t any more waiting for me when I strolled around later. I’ll have another look tomorrow and assess the scale of the invasion!

In doing a bit of research on this I found some great links, and now know far too much about this subject. Apparently the tool of choice is a needle on the end of a stick, and a head-torch so that you can go strolling around the garden at night. Apparently if you do this you can end up with hundreds! I think I might just try and encourage more frogs, toads, hedgehogs and beetles – and maybe add some nematodes too.

Resources

• Cardiff University guide to slugs
• Garden Organic Guide to Pest Control

Planting Almond Trees

Just took delivery of the first trees for the forest section of our eco-house garden.  These have a dual purpose – they’re also the trees we’re planting for the littlie’s naming day we’re having on the weekend. These are Almond trees – Prunus Dulcis ‘Robijn’. And apparently we can expect them to fruit, even up here in chilly wet Manchester. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I think we will need to get some sun to get reliable fruit on them. This particular variety don’t flower until May so if they’re in a nice, south-facing sheltered area the flowers should avoid frost and therefore survive to fruit. And just in case I’m wondering what those Almonds would look like – there is one on each tree!

They’re pretty impressive trees – probably about 180 cm tall already, lots of nicely pruned branches. It’s been quite hard getting tham at this time of year (most of the trees we’ll get will go in bare-rooted in November time) but we found these potted trees at Flora Select and they have been really helpful all the way through the process and delivered them on the day they said they would. Here’s the info they have on these trees:

Prunus dulcis is a small bushy deciduous tree native to Asia and North Africa having pretty pink blossoms and highly prized edible nuts enclosed in a hard green hull.
Fruiting will start two to three years after planting. The flesh of the fruit can be eaten as Almonds are closley related to Peaches and Nectarines.

Plant in well drained fertile soil. Avoid heavy pruning as Almonds flower on second year wood.

• Eventual Height: 4 mts
• Eventual Spread: 4 mts
• Full Sun
• Deciduous
• Fragrant
• Flowering Time: April-May

Now I just have to dig the holes ready for the planting to happen at the Naming Day party on Sunday! That’ll be fun.

Our wartime Victory Garden

The bottom half of our garden was a victory garden during the war – and we’ve managed to get hold of a picture! It’ll be very interesting to compare the traditional row-and-path planting they’ve got here with the wide bed garden that we’re planning.

Many thanks go to the previous owners for leaving this picture for us!

A beautiful wartime Victory Garden

I saw this picture as a kid and it has stayed with me all this time, inspiring my concept of the beautiful, productive potager. I just found the book again – as we’re getting all our old books out of storage following our recent move, and decided to share it. I’m not sure I can even identify all the vegetables they have in that garden, but it is an amazing layout – although I’m sure it could be a little more productive, and I’m not sure they’ve got their companion planting right

Aquaponics Update

Sorry, haven’t been posting much recently – have been sorting out our new house . . . due to move in in a few weeks – working hard – and I’ve been planning out our Aquaponics system.

It’s one of the first things that’s going up at our new house so I’ve been busily over-planning every detail. It’s looking pretty impressive now – go and have a look at the latest version of our Aquaponic Polytunnel over at Garden Aquaponics. Ive also been working hard on what we’ll grow in it – so there’s an update to our planting list there too.

Growing our own strawberries

Our strawberries today

Now we’ve decided to get our hands dirty – even without a garden – there’s no stopping us When we got our Potato Kit we also grabbed some herbs and strawberries. They’re a token effort, but are keeping our spirits up while we try to get a garden of our own. This evening I got back in from work to find my wife and daughter adding gravel to the pot to keep the strawberries off the soil – seems like this is becoming a family hobby – fantastic.

Now we just have to keep them alive until we get some berries!

Just after planting, two weeks ago

Home grown Spinach

We’ve been enjoying a taste of our future the last two nights – delicious home grown Spinach. It’s one of the great grow-your-own cliches that home-grown food tastes immeasurably better than anything store-bought. Now this didn’t come from our garden – it was generously donated from my Mother’s allotment, so we can’t put the fantastic taste down to a warm, worthy glow from our own harvesting. And the taste was fantastic.

I’m not usually that bothered by Spinach, can take it or leave it, but last night I was onto thirds before we ran out, and I’d have kept going if there was more. So now I’m really looking forward to our own home-grown veges!

The recipes? Last night we had it rinsed, wilted, and served with butter and pepper. Tonight we had the rest with chicken in a cheese sauce.

Yum. Bring on our first harvest!

Finally getting our hands dirty – growing our own potatoes

OK, so we don’t have a house yet, so no garden yet, but the gorgeous weather has got our green fingers itching. So we’re taking the “portable garden” route, and using containers so that we can start playing (& learning!). We’re not taking this incredibly seriously so we’ve just started at our local garden centre with a Potato Growing Kit, some strawberries and herbs. 

The kit cost £7, and had three plastic bags and nine seed potatoes that were already starting to sprout! Compost (peat-free) was another £12, so our total spend was almost £20.  There were three varieties in the kit – Duke of York, Maris Peer, and Carlingford – with three seed potatoes for each. We planted them pretty-much according to the instructions on the kit, but with a bit of our own creativity. One variety went into each bag, about a third full of compost. The kit then suggested filling the bags up to the top with the remaining compost, but we went for the quicker gratification that came from covering the potatoes with a couple of inches, and then planning to earth-up the stems as they grow.

After a couple of weeks we’ve now got leaves coming up from every seed potato! We’re all excited – it’s not a bad success rate so far so it’ll be interesting to see what sort of yield we end up getting – if any!

The other great part of this is how excited our eldest is about them. She’s only three, but she’s really enjoyed planting them, and now shows off the shoots to every vistor we have.

Photos of our efforts below . . . 

Growing Dwarf Bananas in the UK

No, I’m not joking. We used to grow bananas, in our Brisbane garden, and had a fair bit of success. Those plants were about 4m high though – and the climate was sub-tropical!

Imagine my surprise then when I saw that one of Monty Don’s favourite fruits to grow is a banana! Admittedly a dwarf banana, but even so – growing bananas in Britain! I had expected those to be one of the items that would become unavailable, or an expensive luxury, in a post-peak-oil world but it turns out we might be able to grow them in a conservatory or greenhouse in our back garden. The variety Monty recommended was a Dwarf Cavendish, which gets to 6-7ft before fruiting, with leaves 2ft long and 6″ wide. It’s a lot smaller than our Lady Finger bananas in Brisbane, but still pretty big for a greenhouse or polytunnel. 

There is an even smaller version avalable though – the Musa Cavendish Super Dwarf Banana. These fruit when they are only 4ft tall – and look like a much better candidate for a greenhouse or polytunnel, as long as you can keep them above 3°c. Might make it onto my planting list if I have the space!

Suppliers

• Hardy Tropicals – for the Musa Cavendish Super Dwarf Banana
• The Plant Directory - for the Dwarf Cavendish from £15
• Carreglefn Nurseries – Dwarf Cavendish Bananas from £10

Choosing a wormery to compost our kitchen scraps

Putting out the rubbish is always one of those contentious jobs in our house. It’s never really been clear whose job it is (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so the bin gets more and more packed full of decomposing leftovers until emptying is incredibly unpleasant and smelly.

But no more! In our new house we’re going to compost everything that we can, with the ultimate aim of never needing a plastic rubbish bag again. Anything squishy should be being composted. End of story. Once our Aquaponics system is up and running I want to have a Black Soldier Fly composting system which will take everything – including meat, fish, eggs, dairy – and which will also provide larvae to feed to our fish. I’m never one to depend on just one solution or species though, so we’re also going to try out a wormery first. This should get us started, but can’t take all the trickier waste.

Inspired by Compost Awareness Week, I found a whole heap of great links on www.homecomposting.org.uk, so here’s what I now know about wormeries:

• They use different worms to those you’ll usually find in the ground
• You can feed the worms to fish
• Don’t trust the legs on them – a full wormery can be pretty heavy
• You’re better off with one that is wider rather than deeper – gets more air to the compost
• Worms eat loads (up to their body weight each day) 
• They breed fast, but won’t over populate
• They don’t need daily attention – they’ll survive a good holiday as long as you feed them properly

You can make your own wormery, and buy the worms separately, but when getting started the best thing to do seems to be to buy a complete kit. There are lots of these available, and a quick look seems to suggest that the Wormcity EcoWormery is the best buy – for  £40. I’ll add it to my shopping list!

Wormery Suppliers

• Wormcity - make a great, simple wormery kit for only £40
• Wiggly Wigglers – makers of the Can-O-Worms and Worm Factory (£89 for full kit)
• RecycleWorks – make the prettiest wormery (as seen above) from £183