Page 18 - Simply Veg Issue 1 2016

I have been
gardening for over forty years, but I guess it was around thirty
years ago when there was a change in legislation, the result of which was that some chemicals that gardeners had used for many years started being withdrawn from sale. Sometime later I got to thinking, naively so, what would the gardener use if all the chemicals were to be removed and not replaced.
I wasn’t starting from scratch as there were solutions out there which had been used on gardens for generations which had just fallen out of fashion. As a
not readily available as coal res had reduced signi cantly.
I believe that when starting a garden you create a unique ecosystem, which attracts insects that like to feed on your particular crops, this process also, brings in predators, not always insects that feed on the insects that are present. That led me into an interest to understand the various garden insects that were present in my garden and what their frailties were, I had to read a lot of books, yes reading real books at a time before the world wide web and it’s plethora of information
was readily available to most of us. Find information I did,
and an interest in the insect world came to the fore.
To me it became increasingly clear
that it wasn’t always necessary to apply commercial chemicals of one sort or another
to get rid of troublesome insects, there are simple solutions and also natural enemies
in the garden, that will help to reduce the populations of garden pests, and that if those predators are encouraged it could become part of a satisfactory level of pest control.
At this point I will say I’m not an organic gardener, my garden shed is not chemical free. Chemicals of one sort or another do play their part in my garden although they tend to be a last resort, and I’m certain
that without some of the new formulations of fungicides some plant diseases would cause major problems. It’s just that I don’t believe that it is always necessary to lather the garden in unnecessary chemicals which might affect the bene cial insects.
Recently I’ve been sharing some of my beliefs with gardening clubs, and trying
to get the message across that it’s not always necessary to reach for the expensive chemical bottle every time something nibbles at your veggies, there are some very simple solutions available, some work better than others, it’s sometimes just trial and error
to nd something that works for you. So this article and others that will
follow will look at the
garden leaf nibblers and sap suckers, and at some of the myths that surround methods for their demise. I’ll share what works for me and what doesn’t. However, various people have suggested methods that have worked for them but I haven’t been able to replicate their success, this doesn’t mean that they don’t work; it just means in my ecosystem they’re not suitable.
Slugs and snails
These Gastropod molluscs have been a challenge to gardeners probably since we started gardening generations ago, and
in recent years have enjoyed a population explosion due to wetter weather and increasing warmer ambient temperatures which obviously favours their breeding conditions. To most people slugs and snails are the number one garden pest, and we all seem to detest the thought of even a tiny one of the little blighters making an appearance in the salad bowl. Yet few of us know anything about these creatures, so I’ll attempt to give you some facts that I’ve discovered to help ll the gaps in your knowledge.
Both Snails and slugs have a common ancestor which emerged from the seas millennia ago. The word gastropod is derived from the Greek words gastros meaning stomach, and podos meaning foot. So you know what they’re good at – eating and walking!
It is suggested that slugs and snails
have 30000-40000 teeth and lose and regrow teeth regularly. Their teeth are not
like sharks teeth but more like the teeth on an engineer’s le. They belong to the larger family of Mollusc, which comes from the latin word ‘mollis’ meaning ‘soft shelled’, and although not so obvious even slugs retain the remnants of a shell, within their body.
So for simplicity a slug is basically a snail without a shell, and did in fact evolve from the snail. Yet the slug is detested, and the snail ‘with its cute little house’ less so. There are people that keep snails as pets, and yet I don’t know any that keep slugs. Some snails are eaten with garlic butter, but the likelihood of slugs suffering the same fate, I would guess is zero!
Everything in your ecosystem has a purpose, Slugs and snails are a source of food for Hedgehogs, frogs, toads, some birds and even smaller invertebrates and ground beetles. The majority of slugs and snails are composters; they break down vegetable matter so in the case of slugs won’t hurt your veggies or owers. There are around 90 species of snail in the UK, although only 5 or 6 species will be seen in
child growing up in
the North East most
gardeners didn’t have
money to waste on
fancy insecticides but
always had something
to deter the pests,
so perhaps a look
back would provide
me with some ideas. One of the things I saw the ‘old’ gardeners use was soapy water for aphids and caterpillars, and a tab bucket (a ‘tab’ in the North east is a cigarette) where all the cigarette ends were thrown and when they had soaked for a week or more, the liquid was used as a nicotine insecticide using the ever present ‘ it sprayer’. To prevent slugs reaching susceptible owers these were ringed with ash from the coal re, the only form of central heating in the fties. It was obvious really there were methods
out there, although some I wouldn’t want to use, like the ‘tab-bucket’, and some were
Of slugs and snails
and mythical tales
Part 1
By Geoff Wilson
I will say I’m not an organic gardener, my garden shed is not chemical free
18 simplyvegetables