The start.2006
First day back to work after my holiday today even though I have been pottering around since I got home on Thursday.
It’s been a funny old year for growing and I think the veg garden has attracted every pest possible, partridge, slugs, pheasant, slugs, moles, slugs, deer, slugs, mice, slugs, caterpillars, slugs,rabbits, slugs, not to mention blight on the tatties, oh and did I mention the SLUGS?
In every square meter there are at least 5 large gastropod mollusk and that’s only the ones I can see. I know they are all part of the ecosystem helping to break down organic matter, but it drives me mental when they’ve been chobbling away at my produce all night.
So much as I hate to admit it I have broadcast the slug pellets. Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch I have used a brand available from ‘The Organic Garden Catalogue’ called ‘Advanced Slug Killer’. The active compound of these pellets is not that nasty ‘metaldehyde’ (toxic to everyone and everything) but ‘ferric phosphate’ which, so they tell me, will break down into iron and phosphate nutrients.
Even so I cant help but feel I am destroying part of a chain that makes the veg garden at Ragley its own little ecosystem. You can’t just wipe out a species like that and not suffer some kind of consequence? What that consequence will be I have yet to find out. Next year I am going to start early and get plenty of beer traps out, its either that or I slash and burn all the wild habitat I have created around the veg garden that the wee b****rs seem to come from!
2008
R.
