The Plot NOW

Nothing's growing at the moment. Of course it is growing a bit, but with so much rain and so little light, it's at a snails pace.

Talking of snails, they're doing really well, as are their cousins, the Slugs. The 3 containers in the swede bed are doing a good job, but the swedes are limping along.

Even the onion leaves have been nibbled by slugs. I've a huge range of sizes of onion this year - it's quite strange. 

I lifted the batch that are consistently small, some having barely grown at all! They had almost NO LEAVES LEFT as they've been eaten right down to the bulb by the slugs and snails.

Unlike my other onions, there was no point leaving these in the ground to swell a little more, as the goodness needed to help the swelling process at this stage is largely derived from the leaves.

The broad beans are rusty largely because of the rain. I've cut away anything that looks like this and picked any affected beans. Often the beans inside the pod are fine and can be eaten. On the up side, Black Fly is struggling to get their teeth into the bean plants - too cold for them,  I guess. 

Courgettes and squashes are getting eaten and haven't got to a big, tough, slug shrugging size yet.

Mind you, the brassicas have done amazingly well with very little slug/snail attack and really good sized plants - across the board. I lost a lot of the seedlings to slug attack when they were first put in, but the survivors; less than a sixth of the originals, are really impressive. It may be to do with the 2 beds being bordered on both sides by alliums, plus the planting of shallots in the brassica beds. There's something about the relationship between the onion family and the cabbage family, I'll rotate them together in future. I may try a control bed of brassicas with no alliums surrounding them, to compare how they do.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll do a 'slug defences' blog; the things that have worked and those that haven't - so far.