Waking up to grey skies and the tap, tap, tap of rain on the skylight is really getting me down. For a while I comforted myself with the fact that the garden is looking greener and fuller than it might otherwise be.
But on the downside, and it’s a downside that to my mind completely outweighs the upside, the slugs are out in force. I have been out each day, picking off the slimy blighters and flinging them in buckets of water or leaving them out for the birds. But still they keep coming, more and more of them.
To date they have claimed all my sweet pea seedlings – I now need to start again, but with the terrible sense that it is utterly pointless; they have destroyed an entire clematis, montana ‘Warwickshire Rose’ (above) – every bud, flower, leaf and shoot has gone, just bare stems remain; I have lost most of my alliums, each one nothing more than a slimy stump.
The clematis was the biggest shock – stripped over the course of two days.
Slug pellets then. Never used them before. But from today it’s war.
