Garden: Slugs Vanquished?

Slugs everywhere.  Spanish slugs, leopard slugs, small brown, stripey grey and luminescent white slugs have plagued our Pyrenees garden since the very first season trying to feed ourselves from our denuded patch of clay subsoil.  I resisted the temptation to use slug pellets, stopped sowing seeds direct into the ground and began spring and summer nightly Slug Hunting patrols.

Last year I counted the number collected just from the potager and was staggered to find it was over fourteen thousand of the slimy munchers.  But this year, things felt different; evening slugs patrols were often in the company of hedgehogs and almost every time  I put fork or trowel to soil I would uncover glow worm larvae.  It was magical..

Garden: Slugs!

We have a huge number of slugs here, although thanks to increasing the habitat for predators - a pond for amphibians, undergrowth for hedgehogs, beetle bunds and long grass for glowing glow worms - and other measures like the nightly slug hunt, numbers so far are down on last previous years.  But I still raise as much as possible away from the vegetable garden just to give it a fighting chance, although that is not without a few dangers.

I have a raised table built out of pallets, with spiky wire mesh around the legs, but I still have to strip it down at least once a week to remove a few intrepid slugs who somehow have climbed up .

Seedling cabbages and lettuces

Garden: Review of the Year

Rubbish!

Well, that was easy ...

Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but 2013 has been far and and away the most difficult growing season we've had.  It started to rain and snow in January and pretty much kept going through until the middle of June, bringing devastating floods to the Pyrenees.  So although we did have an epic ski season, we missed days because there was just so much snow that the roads or resort had to be closed due to the risk of avalanches.

But an epic gardening year, it was not.

Leeks under the snow in February 2013

Potato Harvest

This is the fourth year of growing potatoes here, and every year I say it's just not worth the effort.  And yet every year I end up growing some!  We can buy huge sacks of cheap everyday spuds and small sacks of  really nice interesting potatoes, for a price.

Slug Hunting

Slugs on Honesty

When we first started trying to grow vegetables in our clay field nothing ever  seemed to germinate.  A single evening springtime walk revealed seedlings germinating like mad, but like baby turtles on a beach, they were being snaffled equally quickly by an army of slimy predators before they could make it to the relative safety of the morning.  The ground, the hedges, the walls  were a heaving mass of slugs – big orange ones, small brown ones, stripy ones and black ones, revolting white ones which exude a milky gunk when prodded and even a magnificent leopard slug or two.

Bugs and Beasties

One of the joys of our first spring in France was walking out into the garden and spotting new insects, bugs and beasties.  There seemed to be thousands and I saw something new almost every day.  It was only later that I realised how many of them had designs on my vegetables!  And I'm still not sure who are the good guys amongst this lot.
 

Brassica beetle and two flea beetles