Argh growing stuff has given me so much more headache than it did last year. Last year nearly everything I had put into the ground started to grow like crazy until there was a colder period of time in July. But every small seedling went on for it immediately.
How different could this year be! The whole period of time up until now has been way too wet mostly, and maybe also a bit colder. But the moist is the issue and the moist also draws the slugs towards it. And those slugs are hungy!
Lets take a look at the successes first!
Ahhhh this is just how you would want these scallions to grow. And the cool thing ofcourse is that this is a re-use of the end of an older scallion. That is just too easy to do. Buy them in the supermarket of wherever. Chop off what you want to use and the end of it you just stick the part with the roots in the ground somewhere random and wait.
And even in this colder period of time they kept on growing very quick, qhile even the slugs didn't get to them. Maybe this is because of the scent that they produce?
The taste was really good I must admit!
You can see where I had cut them off last time
And their roots were strong and they were really going for it as you can see. Good stuff, a successstory and I will continue putting these into the ground.
Damn you slugfest!
In one of my previous posts I was already writing about the slugs and snails that are doing all of the damage in the allotment. I must rectify this a bit because snails have a house on their back and they are not the ones that are stealing the food. It is the slugs that are doing the damage, and these guys don't have a house with them, but you can notice the slime on the ground in the morning when they have disappeared again.
One of the suggestion I found was putting coffee around the little plants and that was exactly my experiment.
Collect old ground coffee, wait for it to dry (they don't like dry powdered stuff) and then lay it around the little plants. So there I went with my coffee collection outside to spread it out around the plants as you can see in the image here.
But during the night again it was raining non stop again and I don't know if the coffee had washed away for a bit or just went into the ground. This morning I found everything half eaten again. Sighhh
I am telling you, if my first year was like this, I had never continued gardening as if is really hard to get some success here.
There is some hope!
It looks like this week will be a lot more dry with less rain and maybe that will help on that they will stay away a bit more. I might also head outside for a second when the sun in setting in the evening to see if they are already there to toss them away some meters (they are slow right?)
But also I have a lot of faith in all of the seedlings that I am growing outside at the moment, I'm growing cucumber, tomato, all kinds of hot peppers and more and in about two weeks they are able to go outside.
Maybe by that time the slugs will have disappeared already and the rest will have a nice chance to actually grow! I guess the time for me to go over to a fully self sustainable life would leave me very hungry ;)
Fingers crossed on that it will get better!