With one week to go before we up sticks and move house and garden to sunny Dorset. I bet it rains on moving day! I have prepared my portable, potted garden for travel. The tomatoes in the green house needed to get used to the outside world. With their cosy life under glass coming to an end I have prepared them for life in a new location. Each day I moved them out of the greenhouse for a little longer. i made sure that they were tucked up again by early evening. Eventually they spent the night out alone and having suffered no ill side effects I decided that they were hardy enough to remain in the open.
Confront the Enemy....
Carrots, sweet peas, potatoes and strawberries have been outside for sometime now. Their only enemy being the slugs. There is one particularly huge and predatory slug. I am sorry to say I have not managed to capture on camera yet. But I know where he has been by tracing his long slimy footprint! He comes in to the house through the cat flap. He munches on some cat food, then slimes back out the way he came. With a belly full of whiskas he then trundles round the corner. He slimes his way up the pea and bean patio planter for some pudding! Strong enough to open the cat flap, and well fed on 'carefully prepared, complete nutrition for cats' I imagine he is nearing the size of a small kitten.
One of my solutions for slug tackling is to put out some orange peels as they rather effectively do the job of redirecting and collecting the slimy fellows without much effort. Anyway, having fed, watered and hardened off all the plants I now declare them fit for travel. They can move house and garden with us! All that remains is to pack up myself...which as you can see can have it's difficulties!
