It's a War Out There

It’s all activity this time of year getting the garden going. I have four raised bed and two mini poly tunnels to plant up. Up until this year I have cheated a bit and used plugs which are small plants bought from the garden centre instead of growing my own vegetables from seed. This year I have bitten the bullet and have been trying to grow all my own veg from seed with varying degrees of success.

I started off in early March with broad beans and peas and have followed with all the rest in the last month. It all seemed to be going grand at the start and I had every window sill in the house taken over with seed trays full of the different veg. Since then however I have waging war on an assortment of pests who are hell bend on destroying all my hard work.

The pigeons are laying siege to my peas, the rabbits I suspect are sneaking in at night and helping themselves to my baby lettuces but the bane of my life at the moment are the bloody slugs! I don’t use any chemicals but I sorely tempted at the moment to scatter a liberal amount of slug pellets to try and deter the buggers.

I have put out beer traps which essentially are jars full of beer. The wisdom is that they the slugs love the stuff, have a swig, get a bit pissed and fall in! I don’t know what I am doing wrong, it seems the slugs are loving the beer but instead of falling to a drunken death the beer seems to give them extra vigour with which to launch their next attack on my seedlings! The nightly rounds with a torch and a scissors will have to continue for a while longer yet!