Slugs!

The first harvests are coming in. I've been eating new potatoes and broad beans, and the youngest daughter has almost finished munching her way through the first row of peas.

I hurry home from work and dig up another one of my potato plants. These are quite large and look really yummy. Just enough time to put them on to boil before I settle down with a beer to watch the footy.

One of them has a bit of a hole in it which seems to be full of earth. No problem. I take it over to the chopping board and slice off the end with the hole in it.

Something twitches.

It's an enormous slug - one of those horrible brown ones with the orange round the edges.

And I've just sliced it in half.

Suddenly my potatoes don't seem quite so yummy.


BTW, I never knew slugs ate potatoes. Is this usual? And anyone know how I can stop any more of my spuds from being slug chomped?

Blackfly!

My first infestation – and I’d been doing so well!

They’re attacking my broadbeans – all the tender young shoots covered in a mass of black aphids, and they’re starting to creep over onto the runner beans too.

They’re being farmed by ants and I have to admit it’s rather fascinating watching them running up the stems of the plants tending to their herd, while a couple of large ladybird lavae lurk on a leaf nearby, waiting their chance to move in on unattended stragglers – it’s all drama in my patch of dirt.

But, interesting though it is, it’s not doing my plants a lot of good.

I attacked them last night with a spray of water and liquid detergent but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Perhaps it’s too dilute. I’ll give them another dose this evening with a stronger mix – maybe that’ll be more effective.

Anyone got any good tips for getting rid of blackfly?

Weeds!

I arrive home from a weeks holiday and the first thing I do is run down the garden to check on my patch of dirt.

Wow – hasn’t everything grown!!

The runner beans are halfway up the poles – the broad beans pods are a good six inches long (so hubby tells me) and the peas and potatoes are flourishing.

The nettles are doing really well too. Dandelions and hogweed have sprouted from nowhere – How on earth does hogweed get to be so big in only a week? It certainly wasn’t there when I went on holiday! And there’s loads of it!

And that looks suspiciously like bindweed chasing the runner beans up their poles.

Not good!

I like the poppies though so they can stay.