Slugz
So far my little tract of land has yielded about half a dozen edible radishes. Lots of kale** and today, the tiniest little cauliflower ever. I’ve failed to break even with the original cost of the seeds (about 6 of your Earth ‘dollars’ altogether). The slugs are having a field day though. I posted the problem on Facebook, and I’ve been inundated with slug serving suggestions from slug salad to mezcal with a slug in the bottom. I’m going to try putting a tin can of beer in the garden and luring them away to their boozy deaths. Nanny would have just put a dusting of slug pellets down and salted the stragglers to within an inch of their lives. That’s Welsh practicality for you.
I went on a nice walk this morning though to take my mind off molluscs and am slowly flooding Flickr with pictures of wintery trees reflected in the Willamette. There was a steam train too, if you’re into that kind of thing. Bloody huge it were. My camera sensor is still giving me gip, I think I’ll have to get it professionally cleaned but I don’t want to be cameraless for 3 days at the weekend, so it’s a good thing that Picasa 3 has a very simple ‘retouch’ button perfect for removing dark areas of dust from your pictures. You only see them in the pictures of sky and water, which is 80% of what I seem to shoot…
** (though I don’t like kale, so it’s purely ornamental. I don’t think I encountered it before coming to the US and I’m not sure it’s available in the Youkay… Anyroad, it was one of the designs I put together for Nourishing Nutrition’s T-Shirts t’other day, get them while they’re hot… The “I dig beets” is my favourite…)
Of course there’s kale in the UK although I mainly see the curly variety. Have you tried stir frying it, or just putting it in salads? Depends how tough it is, I guess.
My local florist puts the heads of the decorative variety in her hand-ties. Maybe you should just grow the pretty kale if you aren’t going to eat it! 🙂
To stop slugs, I put sharp gravel around plants I value. That probably doesn’t work so well with veg…
You live and learn, Flash. Many thanks for the tips.
The garden (which got a heavy frost today and is probably moribund) is composed of veggies grown from packets of any seed that had ‘late July’ as the limit on their planting. We moved in in August and I got round to gardening about 2 weeks later… Lucky to have anything really.
Wikipedia says: Kale freezes well and actually tastes sweeter and more flavorful after being exposed to a frost.
So all is not lost! 🙂