Young celery protected by Mary's pots One of the banes of our gardening life (and of course for most gardeners in the UK) is the proliferation of plant and veg eating slugs. Big, small, brown, orange, black - you name it we seem to have them. And they're cunning. Hiding out in the tiniest places until night time when the can devour whole seedlings in no time. Mary is diligent to do slug patrol every evening to collect all the slimey chaps and drop them at the end of the garden. She's tried all manner of tricks to keep them at bay: water moats for seedlings, ground dried egg shell, sharp sand, ... but in the end they always seem to beat the defences. And the patrol is necessary. A particularly difficult time is when the baby plants grown in the polytunnel are planted out in the garden - still quiet frail and yet clearly very tasty to a slug.
But now Mary's ingenuity coupled with her love of re-purposing things has found a pretty darned good solution. Yoghurt pots with a copper ring. The copper comes in a thing film with stick-back, and is easily applied. The bottom of the pots are cut out and placed over the young plants and pushed in to the earth. Slugs, it seems hate the tingly effect their slimey undersides get when moving over the copper - the interaction of slime and copper is like a battery cell.
The plants get sun and watering, and the slugs can crawl up the pots but then are repelled. They can of course come up from the earth inside the pot - but that seems beyond their cunning brains.
This just leaves us to get yoghurt pots, but this is where we have a brilliant local solution. Yeo Valley are the very popular and successful independent dairy producing milk, yoghurt and creams. And they happen to be based and head-quartered just up over the Mendips in Blagdon. Indeed their distribution HQ is here in Cheddar. We love Yeo products and consumer them a lot. The pots were designed for easy recycling of paper outer label and PET pot, but now we don't have to even recycle them. So a big thanks to Yeo and a big ya-boo to the slugs.
Anyone visiting Gorge View Cottage may be interested in visiting the Yeo Organic Gardens with it's fabulous cafe.
But now Mary's ingenuity coupled with her love of re-purposing things has found a pretty darned good solution. Yoghurt pots with a copper ring. The copper comes in a thing film with stick-back, and is easily applied. The bottom of the pots are cut out and placed over the young plants and pushed in to the earth. Slugs, it seems hate the tingly effect their slimey undersides get when moving over the copper - the interaction of slime and copper is like a battery cell.
The plants get sun and watering, and the slugs can crawl up the pots but then are repelled. They can of course come up from the earth inside the pot - but that seems beyond their cunning brains.
This just leaves us to get yoghurt pots, but this is where we have a brilliant local solution. Yeo Valley are the very popular and successful independent dairy producing milk, yoghurt and creams. And they happen to be based and head-quartered just up over the Mendips in Blagdon. Indeed their distribution HQ is here in Cheddar. We love Yeo products and consumer them a lot. The pots were designed for easy recycling of paper outer label and PET pot, but now we don't have to even recycle them. So a big thanks to Yeo and a big ya-boo to the slugs.
Anyone visiting Gorge View Cottage may be interested in visiting the Yeo Organic Gardens with it's fabulous cafe.
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