grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

In case there is any confusion, I should explain this is an evil slug eating my beautiful courgette. The courgettes are the first veg I've grown apart from tomatoes and salad leaves. I know they're really easy and generous to even the most feckless of gardeners but I am very proud of them. They are beautiful and green and luscious and have cost practically nothing. The plants were seedling freebies from a friend, so all they have cost was the little bit of compost to plant them in. I'm counting on them to provide free food through the summer (and winter, if I freeze what I can't eat). I object strongly to slugs, who have plenty of food elsewhere (including my pansies and violas), joining the banquet uninvited. So grrr grrrr grrrrrrrrrr. The only good slug is a dead slug.

Learn to love a slug?

"Learn to love a slug." That's what one of the wildlife sites advises. Give it plenty of organic debris, like fallen leaves and flowers, and it will clean up your garden for you and be too busy to chomp the plants you value. Hah! My garden is not tidy. It is a morass of vegetation, some dead, some dying, some springing to life. At the moment there are foxglove flowers littering the ground everywhere. Do the slugs help to tidy them up? Do they weecht. No, they prefer to munch on my lovely violas. I have had one success though. I have been growing salad leaves in small troughs by the kitchen door. In an effort to deter the slugs I've been emptying the used coffee grounds into the troughs and around their rims and bases. The salad seems to grow quite happily through the mulch of grounds and the slugs have left them alone. Unfortunately so have I and now they have bolted everywhere. I should have let the slugs have 'em. Salad pah, you can't even deep fat fry it. If only chocolate hobnobs grew in tubs of compost.

(BTW I have only just discovered if you click on the thumbnail pics they'll open in to a larger image.)

Two things that didn't make me smile yesterday. Someone is eating my pansies and I don't mean the butterflies. ******* slugs!

And some more gormless gardening. This poor fuschia was covered in aphids. I have no pesticides but thought I would try an older remedy. I had heard Mum mention that Gran used to throw the washing up water over infested plants rather than letting it drain down the sink. I had no used water to hand and didn't want to leave the plant, as it was covered, so put a drop of washing up liquid (well, OK, several large squeezes) in a hand spray and gave the plant a good dousing. That poor, burnt stick-thing is the result . Doh. I wonder if Gran's dishwater had soap rather than detergent, which I don't think was widely available until the late 1940s. Now I think about it, the organic pesticides use saponins rather than detergents. Doh again. Anyway fuschias and Coop antibacterial washing-up-liquid do not mix. Looking on the bright side I can use the rest of the spray as a weedkiller.