13 June 2005

I’m certainly saving my thankses

Again, we’ve not visited the allotment for a wee while, though we hope to go this evening, sometime after the carpet man visits with his samples and tape measure. Fun, fun, fun.

I have been trying to do some work in the garden though which has been a bit neglected recently. Too much work and socialising meant that the lawn had not been mowed in an embarassing length of time. Now, thanks to Owen, the grass is neatly clipped, but that does mean we can fully appreciate what terrible condition it is in. The plan was to mow it regularly this year in order to get on top of the weeds and encourage the grass and clover to thicken up in it. No luck so far.

I’ve been working on the small veggie bed in the garden, clearing the annual weeds (turn your back and the buggers run riot) and removing any casualties of the gastropod wars. The beans are brilliantly twisting up their poles, apart from a couple of the runners that are gamely attempting a comeback from some severe munching but look a bit sad and overwhelmed with nibbles. Most of the courgettes are filling out and looking healthy although two have been eaten so heavily that they have been reduced to leafless stems covered in slime. Luckily I have spare seedlings so I shall replace them today.

The seedlings in my plastic greenhouses have also come under sustained attack from the garden’s slimy battalions, resulting in the almost total loss of my basil plants. I am not happy about that at all.

I wouldn’t mind, but I did finally resort to death traps. I generally don’t like killing things if I can possibly help it, but I decided that my delicate young plants might need more protection than a torch and eagle eyes. So I fashioned some traps out of old milk cartons and filled them with the contents of some old cans of Banks’s Bitter that we had lying around and would never drink.

Who buys beer that they won’t drink? Not us. We won this beer at our local pub by not doing very well in the quiz on a number of occasions. Sometimes we would win a bottle of toilet cleaner white wine. We built up quite a collection of the acidic stuff. Eventually we got into the habit of just leaving the bottle behind when we left the pub as a sort of protest - not one that was ever understood I think! Earlier this year we poured away all the wine we had won as it was taking up space and we knew that not only would we not drink it, but we certainly would not inflict it on anyone we knew. But we kept the beer, because although it’s completely unpalatable, well, it’s free beer isn’t it? And we felt that there was a shadow of a chance that some visitor or other might fancy it.

Well, we were wrong, but I was glad of it when I decided to make my beer traps. Fantastic! No need to dash to Sainsbury’s and pick up cheap beer - we have gallons of it already, just waiting to fulfil its potential and decimate my slug population. I set my traps, put them in choice places and waited, rubbing my hands and cackling gleefully. I’ll admit that I was nervous about how disgusting it would be to have to empty the traps which would no doubt be filled to the brim with pickled slugs, but I felt this was small price to pay to ensure that we would be able to eat some of our own courgettes.

How very wrong I was.

It turns out that slugs and snails - like the rest of us - cannot stand Banks’s Bitter. The traps have remained disappointingly empty. I’ve moved ‘em. I’ve regularly refreshed the beer. I’ve put signs up to advertise happy hour. But no joy. I wouldn’t mind, but these are Brummie slugs and snails! They have the accent and everything. Where’s their civic pride?

If they’re holding out for some Innis and Gunn then they’ll be sorely disappointed.

Filed under: Hard labour — Clare @ 12:29 pm