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Gardening Top Tips: How to Stop Slugs & Snails destroying Your Hostas

Gardening Top Tips: How to Stop Slugs & Snails destroying Your Hostas

Hostas are beautiful plants.  But they so often get ripped to shreds and look awful.  Slugs and snails can decimate a good hosta in a couple of days.  These slimy creatures are every gardener’s worst nightmare. Stop destructive snails and slugs from snacking on your garden without using deadly baits.

Remove slugs and snails by hand. During the day, check underneath your hostas thoroughly, they’re favourite hangouts for snails. By night, use a flashlight and follow their shiny trails to find them.

Spread natural or agricultural-grade diatomaceous earth over the soil in flower beds or around individual plants. The tiny, sharp-edged granules cut the soft-bodied slugs and cause them to dehydrate. Reapply after each rainfall.

Install barriers of 2-inch or wider copper stripping around plants and flower beds. Do this only after you have removed all slugs and snails from inside the area, because the slimy pests won’t cross copper and will be trapped inside to munch away.

Position ceramic flowerpots upside-down to trap snails and slugs that will accumulate there to rest in the shade. Overturn them and remove the snails daily until the infestation is exhausted.

Set yeast traps in troublesome beds. Sink a shallow jar or store-bought trap so the top is flush with the ground. Fill the traps with beer – regular or nonalcoholic – to 1/2 inch from the top and wait for the snails and slugs to fall in and drown. Check the traps every few days.

For those of you who can’t imagine wasting beer on snails, try this home brew: Add 1/2 tsp baking east and 1 tbsp. sugar to the water in each trap.

Minimize the moist and cool spots in your garden, such as woodpiles and empty flowerpots, which slugs and snails need to survive sunny days.

Copper Foil Slug Tape

They like leaves that are beginning to wilt, so if you do some weeding, leave the weeds around for a few days as the slugs will eat those first. Use local mulch as much as you can – slugs love wet leaf mulch, and are far happier staying in the damp and eating dead leaves than venturing into the open spaces in your flower beds.

Toads are a good natural predator.  Nurture your toad population!

Allotment Gardening, Blog, June, Summer

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MyGardenSchool on Panel at The Bulb of Year Award

MyGardenSchool on Panel at The Bulb of Year Award

The Bulb of the Year Awards is an annual event that has run for over a decade.  Each year, a select panel of leading gardening journalists vote for the year’s must-have bulbs according to their versatility, appearance and ease of growing.  MyGardenSchool has been lucky enough to be included on the panel for the last two years.

This year – we wanted to champion a bulb for the insects.  We championed Allium sphaerocephalon.  We didn’t champion it to win necessarily, but more to draw attention to the bulb growers, that there will be more demand in the future, for planting bulbs that nurture our bees.

Winners of the journalists’ vote were announced at the award ceremony in London. Results will be shortly be posted on the International Bulb Centre website.

Blog, Bulbs

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Why Gardening is appealing to the Younger Crowd

Why Gardening is appealing to the Younger Crowd

So the gardening war is not really as micro as the little UK TV war of The Titch versus Big Don (which ‘gardening celebrity’ to plump for from our comfy chairs on a Friday Night in British Suburbia?). In fact the majority of the gardening world, wouldn’t actually have a clue who these guys are.

In the macro gardening world, there is a much stronger, global war, going on. An uprising against the big supermarkets. A war on importers bringing us unripe fruit and veg. A distrust of the food supply chain – also further fueled in Europe by the unfortunate German beansprout incident – spare a thought for the poor Spanish cucumber growers as well – innocently caught badly in the media crossfire.

Partly as a result of this disillusionment, there is the beginnings of a tidal wave of the younger generation reclaiming their responsibilities to, and interest in, the planet. They’re taking the production of their own food into their own hands, and catching the gardening grow-your-own bug with gusto (or should I say the GYO?!). A softer, more homely instinct is starting to prevail, where people want to nurture their own space, and have a new found respect for horticultural pursuits. Perhaps this is born out of a need to get back to core values, literally back ‘down to earth’, after the economic difficulties as a result of bloated consumerist societies of the last few decades.

As Rob Sproule (aged 33) puts it very aptly in the online Edmonton Journal, “One of the myths of modern gardening is that young people don’t want to get their hands dirty. As a co-owner of a large greenhouse, I live on the front lines of a rapidly changing gardening world. Young people, often with toddlers or strollers in tow, are getting their hands dirty with enthusiasm and vigour.

They are doing it for different reasons. Some want to be able to grow their own food; some want their children to grow up in the garden; and some just see it as another change to express themselves.  The important thing for me is that young people are starting to return to the soil and their fresh perspectives are redefining Canadian gardening.

The stereotype that deters many young people from gardening is that it’s labour intensive, time-consuming, and involves pushing some kind of plow through long, sun-scorched rows of potatoes and beans.

The truth is that gardening, like anything else, is what we make it, and the next generation of gardeners is making it creative, fulfilling and, most of all, fun.”

Allotment Gardening, Blog, Eat Organic, Gardening People, Grow Something, Grow Your Own, Ideas, June, March, Summer, Tip

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Girl Conquers The Earth contd..

Girl Conquers The Earth contd..

Girl Conquers The Earth – Episode II
Did I really refer to my allotment as “a little careworn plot”? Little? What was I thinking? This week, in the rain and the wind, it seemed to get bigger by the second. We dug and we dug and we dug and we dug, but still we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Did I mention the digging?

Slowly but surely the kids were tempted off our patch of dirt onto the beautiful allotments to help do nice things like plant radishes and tie strips of plastic to the netting (scares the pigeons and the curious pheasant away, apparently). At some point I threw down the pitchfork (that’s not a clever metaphor, I literally threw down the pitchfork) and said it was going to take a miracle to sort the allotment out.

The miracle appeared in the form of Sharon. She’s our neighbour on the allotment and had watched our slow, painful progress over the past couple of weeks and came over to lend a hand (and water, tools and plants as it turned out).

She advised us to concentrate on just half of the allotment as trying to tackle the whole thing was overwhelming. You wouldn’t believe how much better we felt when we had covered half of the allotment with weed resistant covering (so whatever else happened to that land, it couldn’t get any wilder). Next, Sharon told us to put all our effort into preparing a small corner of the uncovered allotment to plant some vegetables – that got the kids’ attention – so that we could see (and feel) we were making progress.

Happiness was restored as we got the kids to edge their little plot with stones and Sharon, armed with ornamental spinach, leeks and cabbages, hunkered down to give us a special allotment gardening class. Now, if there’s one thing that Sharon knows it’s how to grow vegetables. She told us where to put the spinach (which should grow to four feet ) so that it could protect the other little plants from the wind. She taught us that cabbages don’t really like leaving their little pots so when they go in the ground they have to be ‘tucked in’, and – amazingly – when planting leeks you simply put them in the hole you’ve dibbed (is that the correct term?) and fill the hole with water. That’s it.

Now I do know that the golden rule of growing vegetables is take really good care of the earth ( and then to a large extent the plants will take care of themselves) but it was so good for our morale to plant our first few vegetables. We carefully put nets on them and have been watering them every other day. I swear I can see that spinach growing!

We are now concentrating on working well rotted manure into the rest of the half-allotment to get it prepared for planting later on (apparently the little plants don’t like it when manure has just been worked in so we can’t plant vegetables yet). Part of me is worried that I am never going to plant anything – I am too late for this, the ground is not right for that, but another part thinks that it must be possible to grow something….. aren’t vegetables grown all year round? Either way I need to get a wiggle on and get the earth ready as soon as possible. That’s why I am bringing in the big guns this weekend. Come over dad, your daughter needs you!

Allotment Gardening, Blog, Eat Organic, Girl Conquers Earth, Grow Something, Grow Your Own, June

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Girl Conquers the Earth!

Girl Conquers the Earth!

by Tara Sinclair,

Well technically a woman embarks on some extreme allotment gardening, which doesn’t sound quite as interesting or exciting. But believe me it is.

I know nothing about gardening, but last year had a little go at growing vegetables at home- just a few random bits and bobs in the back garden. Thanks largely to the love and care that was lavished on the soil by its previous owners , my tomatoes and runner beans went bananas, and the mint was enough to supply mojitos for the whole summer. Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory by the brassicas – I was only told to keep butterflies off, not snails out – but I don’t talk about those.

Nevertheless, buoyed up by my success, I decided that the very thing would be to get an allotment so that I could provide my family of five with lovely, fresh organic veg and fruit all year round. Grow your own veg!! Easy! I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing it!! Except it turned out that everyone is doing it. In my little village alone, the list for allotment is years long. Y.e.a.r.s.

But then, as if by magic, the lady who keeps chickens up the road announced in the local paper that she was going to turn over some of her land for allotments. A sign, surely! So I grabbed one.

Oh oh. The first thing I learned is that just because grass grows in abundance, the ground is not ready for planting. There were huge heavy clods of baked earth (in England! Where is the rain?) and a ton of stones but worse – far worse – more able gardeners for neighbours that had rotovated and installed water butts by the time I had my first visit.

So I got some gardening books from the library, but I took an age to read them because with a full time job, a husband that also works and three kids, the only get time to sit down and read is in the evening. For the same reason, gardening classes just weren’t an option. I went to online forums to have a look around but everyone seemed to be in agreement that I had left it a bit too late to plant anything – and no one seemed to have a wilderness of an allotment to tame. How was I going to get to grips with the basics, fast? And how was I going to stick to such a daunting task, come rain or shine?

To solve the first problem I signed up for ‘Edible Gardening Made Easy’ with Alex Mitchell. I am just one tutorial in but I already got a compost bin, and have done my homework and discovered that my earth is predominantly clay. I am looking into suitable things I can plant. My kids are really excited to be helping out – especially with my homework – and my eldest Sam actually said that I don’t have to make helping out on the allotment part of his pocket money because he loves it and he’d do it for free. I could not make this up.

To solve the second problem – sticking with it – I have decided to write this blog and post regular updates and pictures. It will keep me honest. I am actually very nervous about this because a. I am not an expert, b. I think I really have left it a bit too late to plant things, c.it’s a daunting task and d. I am having to make time in an already busy life to conquer the allotment.

But I must admit that I am excited by this daunting challenge. Not only because my kids are so very keen to take part but also because I think it will be a hugely satisfying to take this little careworn plot of land and turn it into a well-loved, productive allotment. I hope I’m not eating my words before I’m eating my vegetables.

Allotment Gardening, Blog, Eat Organic, Gardening People, Grow Something, Grow Your Own, June, Summer

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