Slugs

I made a beer trap to reduce slugs in my garden, and, because it only used things I was going to throw out anyway, it was completely free. Free is my favourite kind of gardening, and reducing plastics being sent to recycling and landfill sites is always a good thing.

I noticed yesterday that something had been eating my pea plants as soon as they sprouted,  and my first suspicion is usually always slugs.* However, we are on semi-lockdown so I can't really run out and buy copper tape or fancy traps right now. Also, I spent all my money on a fancy pants raised bed, and a couple of obelisk thingies that were on sale, for my squashes to climb up,** so I needed a cheap solution to my slug issue.

The peas I've been overwintering since October are staring to flower. They're lovely,  but I don't want them to be the only peas I get this year.

* this may be misplaced suspicion,  because it has been very dry lately and slugs usually like moist weather, but doing beer traps is quicker than sitting up all night with a torch, staking out my peas to see what's nibbling. If the traps keep coming up empty,  I'll have a rethink.

**for some reason the clothes airer I used to support my butternut squash plants last year developed a...fanbase? You lot are odd.  But yes, Clarence the clothes horse will be back this year too, to support the pumpkins. Again, I do love to reuse stuff I'd normally have thrown out.

You will need:

• 2 small tubs of similar sizes, with one being small enough to fit fairly snugly inside the other.

Small margarine tubs are ideal, but you can also use food packaging, the bottoms of plastic milk bottles, yogurt pots, pretty much anything. 

• A can or bottle of beer or cider.

The cheapest of the cheap stuff will do nicely. In usual circumstances I'd tell you to go smile sweetly at the local pub landlord and ask if you can have the dregs from the drip trays - they'll usually  be glad to give them to you for nothing. At the moment though, with pubs being closed, that isn't really an option. So get some manky own brand or have a rummage in the back of the cupboard. I found a bottle in the back of the fridge from last Christmas and that'll do fine. Slugs can't read expiry dates.

• Something flat to cover it with  to keep other critters out. 

Random scrap of wood, half a brick, old saucer,  old plastic lid, anything will do. Don't use the lid of your tub though - it needs to be smaller than your tub so there's access for the slugs. 

• Something to dig a small hole with - a trowel is perfect. 

That's it!

Putting your beer trap together

Take the slightly smaller of your two tubs, and pierce some holes in it. You don't need loads, just enough so that when you lift it out of the other tub the beer will run out into the tub below, leaving the slugs in the tub with holes in. This will make it a lot less unpleasant to empty, and will mean you're using less beer to top it up. 

I skipped this step by using a plastic strawberry punnet as my inner tub,  which helpfully came with holes already in it, and fits nicely in my margarine tub. 

Next dig a hole large enough for your biggest tub to sit in, with its edge level with the ground.

I found it easier to dig a hole slightly bigger than I needed, sit the tub inside and then backfill around it like I was planting a new plant.

Once your bigger tub is in the ground, put your holey tub inside it. Then fill the tubs with beer.

It doesn't matter if the whole tub isn't full - using a whole bottle only half filled my trap, but the slugs will still be able to smell it.

To keep other animals and bugs out, reduce evaporation so you aren't constantly refilling it, and make it even more attractive to the slugs you're trying to trap, you want to cover most of the trap with something. I used a piece of very thin ply that I had in the shed, but you can use anything you've got lying around.

I put a stone on top to stop my cover being blown away.

In a couple of days I'll take up the cover, lift out the inner tub  (slowly so as not to spill all the beer!), and empty out any dead slugs before replacing the the inner tub and topping it up with beer if it needs it.

What do you do to keep your veggies safe from slugs? Tell me in the comments or come for a chat on twitter with the hashtag #VsBoringGardenTweets.

Happy growing!

First Year Fails

I've just finished harvesting the last of the tomatoes, and all that's left in the garden is a few tiny butternut squashes that are stubbornly trying to ripen and I don't have the heart to cut down yet, the stumps of some brassica that have been entirely consumed by white cabbage butterflies, and some potatoes that appear to be trying to come back to life despite it being long past harvest time for them (they're growing in a bag and it was tucked away under the fuscia, so I forgot about them). My first growing season is coming to a close and, while there is still lots to be done, it feels like a good time to reflect on the growing year, and think about what has worked and what hasn't.

We've had some brilliant harvests, far beyond what I expected in our first year. Leaving aside the abundance of apples (since the tree was started years ago), our first year has given us buckets of tomatoes, a huge butternut squash, potatoes, curly kale, carrots  (more on those later) , sweetpeas by the armload, courgettes, fresh coriander (more on that later too), a bit of mint (more on that too - only I could kill mint!), some of the world's freshest smelling cucumbers, and three alpine strawberries.

We've also had some mega fails. 

I'm a total beginner trying to teach myself how to garden with no money. So if I see for example, damage on my courgette plants:

I'm scurrying off to the internet to look up pests and diseases of the plant, discovering that (in this instance) it's powdery mildew, and then looking up "free fixes for powdery mildew." There's a lot of trial and error involved, so some stuff is definitely not going to work.

We had a few courgettes before the plants succumbed to powdery mildew, but the fruits they produced after the leaf damage was visible were tiny, and shrivelled up on the vine before getting bigger. The plants are still trying though, and are flowering today, on the first of October.  Next year I'll look up preventative measures when I start my seedlings and consider spacing the plants further apart to stop the disease spreading from plant to plant as easily.

I won't be using the affected plants in my lasagna raised bed either, because I don't want the disease to stay in my new soil. Our council does garden waste collection, which I never usually use because I compost most of our garden trimmings or chuck them on the bug hotel, but I will send them my diseased plants for composting because the council uses a much hotter method to compost their waste, and that'll kill off the spores. If your council doesn't do garden waste collections, I'd recommend burning diseased plants rather than composting them so you aren't building up future issues in your soil.

Pintrest Fail

The internet has been a great tool for teaching myself how to grow food. It's also been a great way to teach myself a load of cobblers that doesn't work.  Pintrest, I'm giving you the heavy side eye right now.

If you've ever looked at garden stuff on pintrest you'll have seen the hanging strawberry planters made of drink bottles. They look lovely, masses of fruit pouring down in cascades from a happy healthy plant.

This idea ticked a lot of boxes for me. It's a free planter, it reuses something before recycling, thus making it a bit more sustainable, and I happen to have an ugly steel washing line post concreted into my garden that is crying out to have something pretty and living to adorn it. Drink bottles are made of food grade plastic so they're unlikely to leech harmful toxins into the soil, and the tops would act as protection from the pigeons and the elements.  It made so much sense.

And when I first planted it up, it looked great:

Don't they look adorable? I was so pleased with myself. I'd taken time to cut drainage holes into the bottom, tied them up with yarn, gave them plenty of space (one per pot), and I could see them from my favourite spot on the sofa. And best of all they were freeee. I do love a bargain.

An extremely short time later:

Nailed it.

I'm really not sure what went wrong. I'm pretty sure they had enough drainage. It's possible their roots didnt have enough room, but I couldn't see any roots trying to escape. In theory it should have worked. But in practice - huge fail. Not a single flower, runner or fruit from any of my strawberries, every plant completely dead.

I'm not sure why my alpine strawberries did so badly. I had them in a standard pot, medium sized. It's possible it was overshadowed by other plants and didn't get enough light/water. I wasn't expecting the potatoes to grow as big as they did, so they overshadowed the pot a fair bit, and I was a bit cavalier about watering them. They produced three fruits and one runner (which my dog promptly broke off). The plant is still alive, so i may pop it in the greenhouse over winter and see if it does better next year, but I'm not too hopeful for it. Next year I think I'll try strawberries in one of the raised beds instead of pots.

Pests

We were very lucky with pests in general this year, and didn't have many issues at all, but our poor brassica! 

I planted a lot of purple sprouting broccoli into my bookcase planters, next to the house. They were in with some rainbow chard, curly kale, and beetroot. The beetroot didn't germinate (I'm blaming that on ancient seed) and the chard was a bit spindly and feeble (again, very old seed), but it tasted ok in a stir fry. We got some lovely curly kale too, which I mostly chucked into curries and stir fries, but I did have a go at making some kale crisps. Would not recommend - they taste exactly as green as you'd expect.

The broccoli started off so well, I had really high hopes for it. But something kept stripping the bottom leaves. I did suspect mice, because they essentially have a sheltered path from the shed they sometimes hang out in for warmth and the beds since I put the raised beds in. But now I'm not so sure. 

The broccoli stalks continued to grow, but each new leaf was destroyed in days, disappearing in circular chunks until it was gone. It wasn't until my youngest son was marvelling at all the pretty butterflies that I realised it's highly likely to be a cabbage white butterfly eating them. Luckily I love butterflies more than I love broccoli.

If I do broccoli or cabbage next year (which I think I might, because I've not tried many autumn/winter/very early spring plants yet), I might net some of them with an old net curtain or something similar so we actually get some of the crop. I'll leave some of them unnetted though, because butterflies also have to eat. I don't mind sharing with the wildlife, as long as they leave some for me.

Bolting

A lot of my crops bolted - went suddenly leggy, flowered and went to seed.

 We did have some extreme temperatures here compared to usual and I think that may have contributed, but with the coriander especially,  and possibly also the rainbow chard which also bolted, I think it was also because I wasn't harvesting often enough. If I had cut them more I think they'd have put more energy into producing leaves instead of going to seed.

I did intentionally leave some of my radishes to bolt so I could collect seed, but one of my children very helpfully pulled up "the dead plant" for me before it could seed properly. The flowers were very pretty though, and the bees seemed to like them. 

Sudden hot spells of weather seemed to precede all the bolting in my garden and if the upward temperature trend continues its going to be something gardeners are going to have to contend with more and more.  Planting more heat tolerant plants might be the way forward, but I would really miss my temperate climate loving plants if they had to go, so I will be thinking about planting in patterns that create shade and dampness for those that need it.

Carrot fails 

We actually did get a small crop of carrots, enough to chuck into a shepherd's pie at least. But I didn't space the seeds well at all, and they grew in little clusters and didn't have much room to spread out. Next year I am going to have to find a way to space them better, because carrots seeds are teeny tiny and I kinda gave up when I was planting this year. I thought as the carrots great eye might sort of nudge each other out of the way, but instead they just grew kinda long and spindly.

Over winter I will try and find some tips for spacing carrot seeds that don't involve cooking them into a floury paste (which seems a bit of a faff to me).

Pumpkins

My pumpkins were another absolute fail and it's the thing I am most salty about. I can brush everything else of with a "meh, it's my first year, I'm still learning" but I was so excited to grow pumpkins and they started off so well.

I got this pumpkin (for a fiver, down from £25) on October 31st

It easier on big I couldn't lift it, and the very kind local shopkeeper dropped it round for me. I had to roll it through the house to carve it. It looked great when it was made into a lantern, despite my total lack of pumpkin carving skills.

Isn't he a happy looking lantern?

As you can imagine, such a huge pumpkin was overflowing with seeds. We toasted some because my daughter loves toasted pumpkin seeds, and we saved some to plant, although I wasn't sure they'd germinate.

They started off marvellous. Strong healthy happy little seedlings, almost visibly growing, they went so fast. They didn't suffer any transplant shock when I planted them out. We even seemed to get baby pumpkins forming:

But each time they'd get to about the size of a golf ball, maybe a little smaller, and wither and drop off the plant. The foliage started to look tired and droopy and die off. It didn't respond to feeding, but didn't seem to have any classic squash disease symptoms.

Positioning may have been an issue. I didn't plant them in one of my beds, or on the sides of the garden qhere most of my veg were. Instead I planted them on the side where my trees are, so they may have lost out on some nutrients, and some light. There's a holly tree nearby so that may have made the soil a little more acidic,  and it's also the area where my dog scratches and digs a lot, so it may not be the best quality soil. I'll try again next year with store bought seeds, in a sunnier, more fertile spot.

How do you manage to kill mint?

That area is also where I planted the mint that died. No one is supposed to be able to kill mint, it's highly invasive and spreads like mad, and you should really only plant it in a pot unless you want it to take over.

I actually wanted it to take over. The area I planted it in used to be grass but my dog scratches and digs at the ground in that particular area so much that it's just bare soil now. It's right outside the back door so in summer the kitchen is full of dust and in winter it's like a swamp. I wanted something hardy that would spread out and cover the ground, and mint seemed ideal. I imagine it'd smell lovely when the dog tries to scratch it up. But imagining is all I can do because the dog scratched it to death before it could establish.

I've chucked a load of bulbs into the ground now in the hope they'll discourage the mutt from scratching, but I doubt it will. He's quite set in his ways, and scratching the ground releases pheromones that mark the garden as his and help keep the neighbourhood cats out. I can't change his nature, so I shall just be grateful he isn't doing it on my main veg patch.

 I might try again with the mint next spring and see if some can take hold. My supermarket herb rescues usually do quite well  (I'm going to do a post on keeping your supermarket herbs alive soon) , so I'm actually impressed I managed to kill off the mint, given how invasive it is.

So those are my main garden fails of my first year. I hope they've inspired you to have a go, and not get too disheartened if things don't work out how you planned. Every major garden fail is a new bit of knowledge and experience under your belt, so the time isn't completely wasted. Even if someone is showing off a lot of successful harvests, it doesn't mean everything else in their garden is going to plan. Their grass might just look greener because it's infested with bindweed.

And if that isn't a metaphor for the whole of social media I don't know what is.