So the Spanish put them in the rice dishes , maybe the UK can get an arrangement with them ????? They would be partially cleaned ,perhaps ready for eating if we send them by a certain company.
From what I can tell, you put a great deal of effort into improving your soil and are very adventurous in your planting. I wonder if in providing the perfect environment for your plants, you're doing the same for your slugs.
I am of the current opinion that I have probably gone out of my way to make my situation worse. Ten years ago the slugs situ certainly wasn't this bad, but then there was only gravel and shrubs here, with only lawns in the NDN gardens either side. My rewilding efforts, log piles, 'lop and drop' permaculture techniques, leaf piles for some years under hedging, wood chip everywhere, all of it may have contributed. Home composting, tonnes of manure. It's hard to evaluate - though I did do some slug trials last year which were instructive and useful.
Nemotodes proved to be bugger all use for me (counting, hunting and tracking the results). With night hunts I was taking off over 1000 slugs a month from the back and not making a dent. And several hundred extra from beer traps. No dent.
What I can be fairly certain of is that the biomass and the biodiversity in the garden has gone through the roof in ten years, though only in certain fields. Again it's hard to properly evaluate as most of it will be currently invisible to me. There is a lot of food for pollinators April to Sept ish, and some nectar for the rest of the year. Worm populations seem to have exploded everywhere (don't know which types). We're homing bumbles and wild solitary bees. Interesting fungus, ants, foxes, some amphibians. Not so much beetle life I have noticed, but varied spiders. Bird life may be reduced as I have stopped putting out feeders because of rat concern, but we sparrows, wren and blue tits nesting on site.
I am trying to see our set of terraced gardens as one big territory, whch is probably how birds, foxes, frogs etc see it. I planted up NDN's gardens with plants and trees that I don't have. That's worked well, except that their slug populations are probably now booming too.
In a reverse of policy I have taken out log piles and am cleaning up prunings and leaves. It feels very odd indeed, but in taking out the logs, for example, the under sides of all of them were simply coated in slugs. Using more pots is a reversal too. In trying to conserve more water I took everything out of pots, but I discovered I can't grow herbacious perennials really at all, so I have brought back pots for those.
This is phlox plant over a foot high in a tall pot, well off the ground: just a slug frenzy.
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I am trying to find a balance - for the joy of exploding nature and the joy of growing too. The point of my garden is also very much as a learning space too, so I am keen to experiment.
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Bruce and the RED Gardens learning project in Ireland is very close to my heart. He nails so much, uniquely, in the video below (I've posted it here before). He says "what inspires new growers to start a garden is likely contribute to its failing". If we are bringing some kind of ideology (No dig, rewilding, biodynamics, organic only, NGS or whatever) we can use the rules as rods for our back. We put so many limits that we don't take advantage of all the opportunities we have and we don't adapt. With a yard stick of specific success, we can get fed up too quickly and give up.
"The primary focus for new growers is just to keep growing". That's all. Not bigger or better, or wilder or 'purer' - just keep going and keep learning. I really think this holds for all creative projects. The goal for singers should be to keep singing, writers should keep writing; keep cooking painting, dancing, finding the joy in what we're doing. So many neighbours tried gardening for a few years and then gave up because they dreamed of a floral or veg paradise, tried and failed at that. They found it to be lonely, expensive, difficult to realise their dream, painful, weeds came back, slugs ate everything or cats crapped everywhere. We need smaller goals and to celebrate our successes.
You have done fantastic work in your garden, @Fire. And if those are Spanish slugs - and they look very like it from the pictures,- it's nothing you have done to encourage them at all. They breed incredibly fast and just take over. You might have brought them in on a bought plant, but once in, they just multiply.
I have found picking them off really does work but you have to keep at it and not everyone has the time or ability to do it. Getting the babies from about late January is the most effective way. It took me a couple of years before I saw a real change but now it's much easier and less work. My garden is bigger than a city garden and includes stone walls, log piles, compost heaps but these are not the cause of the problem, it's the nature of the slugs which did not evolve to live in mild, damp England.
Don't despair! You can still have all the things you want in your lovely garden if you can manage the slug picking.
My plot is too big to try nematodes and I don't want to use even the ferrous sulphate pellets anymore as they may be bad for earthworms and probably won't be good for the frogs and toads either. I'm going to try yeasty dough balls which will attract but not kill. Then we can collect them and drown them in a bucket of salty water or else lob them in the pond but sod's law says some will swim and carry on to breed and multiply.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
Something is eating the odd celandine down to stalks. I'm not bothered as I have a more than adequate supply. Now if I could introduce them to yellow oxalis and grim urbanum ..........🤔 (Predictive text favours grim. I'm inclined to agree)
Thank you @Posy . I took out the last of my wood piles today and it was heartening to find lots of baby frogs. It kind of sums up the dillema - to find a lot of frogs and a lot of slugs snuggled up together under there. I have lots of good green cover and stone piles, which seem perhaps a bit less attractive to molluscs.
I do find myself swinging back towards growing shrubs (and roses) as they eaten less where I am. It's disheartening to feel myself giving up on perennials and biennials like foxgloves.
I find a mix of envy, astonishment and disbelief in watching gardeners on TV direct sowing salad crops in the ground and have them grow. A whole different world.
I try and focus on all the advantages I do have - having a garden, for one thing. Great soil amended over ten years, sun, worms, frogs, bees, good neighbours. It's too easy to focus on the deficits.
In answer to the question of why it should matter how the RHS class slugs and snails:
It's a pretty big deal for the country's main horty-cultural body to slowly swing around to "wildlife-first" policies. It's taken sixty years to get to this point. In my view they have been kicking and screaming against organics, wild gardens, non-spraying, non pesticide approaches.
I am not on the inside of the 'scene' at all, but I read people like Charles Quest Ritson, people very influential within the RHS, and see them rage against "weeds" in the garden. He deeply hates plants like cow parsley or buttercups in the garden. He rants about the decline of Chelsea and how dare they have ox eye daisies or nettles anywhere near show gardens. Like some on this forum, he views rewilding ideas as a dangerous passing fad. He is all for formal gardens only, with yew topiary and aligned rose gardens. This, to him, is what a proper garden looks like.
When influential people like Christo Lloyd rip out rose gardens and put in bananas, it enraged a good part of the garden Establishment. Fergus Garrett is still controvertial in some parts - planting wildflower meadows at Dixter, championing biodiversity planning. He will be getting flack for this. Monty too - untrained, mucky, scraggy Monty who loves his frogs.
I'm quite fascinated by Snot. It coats the literary world, the cooking world, the gardening world and probably everywhere else. What is Proper, Historic, Respectable, Official and Approved? Who are viewed as the Upstarts, the Rebels, the Disrupters, the Plebs - not part of the Establishment nor wanting to be. Posh Gardening verus Democratic Gardening.
I would say that the move to embrace wildlife in gardens has not at all come from the top - but from outside that bubble - from eco growers, the mucky, untrained enthusiasts, who will take slime over snot any day of the week.
I would add that the popularity of the more relaxed show gardens among the paying public, and those viewing Chelsea on TV, must have told the RHS something about how most of us gardeners feel about these issues.
I would say that TV and certainly the internet has played a large part in the 'democratisation' process, for good or ill. Feedback to the powers that be is very swift and strong. The likes of Twitter, FB and Instagram has surely flattened out many scenes dramatically.
People on this forum often comment that the "Your Gardens" section of GW feels plebby. They roll their eyes. But I am personally all for inclusion and spreading the love. Access and inspiration is easier to find.
Posts
They would be partially cleaned ,perhaps ready for eating if we send them by a certain company.
I have found picking them off really does work but you have to keep at it and not everyone has the time or ability to do it. Getting the babies from about late January is the most effective way. It took me a couple of years before I saw a real change but now it's much easier and less work. My garden is bigger than a city garden and includes stone walls, log piles, compost heaps but these are not the cause of the problem, it's the nature of the slugs which did not evolve to live in mild, damp England.
Don't despair! You can still have all the things you want in your lovely garden if you can manage the slug picking.
My plot is too big to try nematodes and I don't want to use even the ferrous sulphate pellets anymore as they may be bad for earthworms and probably won't be good for the frogs and toads either. I'm going to try yeasty dough balls which will attract but not kill. Then we can collect them and drown them in a bucket of salty water or else lob them in the pond but sod's law says some will swim and carry on to breed and multiply.
(Predictive text favours grim. I'm inclined to agree)