Wordless Wednesday

Seeking to Live in Harmony with Slugs

I imagine slugs are a problem for most gardeners, they sure have been for me. It is so discouraging to go to the garden in the morning and see only the stalks left on bean plants and other vegetable seedlings. In the “old” days I used to use powdered slug bait to get rid of them. Later on, I used beer to bait them.

I have become increasingly uncomfortable with killing the slugs. Early this year it seemed I had more than ever; especially in my two worm bins. Believe me, good compost and free food can raise some BIG slugs. During the early part of the summer, I relocated them to other parts of the yard and hoped the slugs didn’t make their way back to my garden. Occasionally, when I found them in the worm bins, I just left them there.

Then one day I decided to check out the relationship between worms and slugs. I was very dismayed to discover that slugs EAT worms! I even found videos that showed that happening.

Eating my vegetable starts was one thing, but getting plump from eating my worms was completely unacceptable. From then on I took the slugs to the bottom of the lot behind my house, about 250 feet away from my garden and my worm bins. That area is full of blackberries vines but I pulled up a lot of morning glory plants and made the slugs a soft bed of edibles.

Next year I will make a home for them that is more hospitable, but still far away from things I hold dear.

I will also experiment with other ways to protect my seedlings. For example, I like the gutter planters that my friend Saroja created this year. She didn’t put her seedlings into the garden until the plants were big enough to be of no interest to the slugs.

I am happy that I have found ways to protect my garden and worm bins without killing the slugs. I hope to be even more successful in that venture next year. If you have found peaceful ways to deal with the slugs in your garden, I would love to hear about them!

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I found the information in the following articles very interesting:
Fascinating Slug Facts
Slimy Summer Invasion
Earthworms protect against slugs

Article written for PNW GreenFriends Newsletter: August

Wordless Wednesday

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close Up

I decided to start close up and then give an ever bigger view.

Posted for Weekly Photo Challenge: Close Up

Abundance from the Garden

Before I left for Toronto last Thursday I harvested everything I could from the garden in an attempt to keep the vegetables from getting huge during the five days I was gone. I can only imagine how big those items would have been if I had left them on the plants. I came home to a whole new set of gigantic vegetables!

This is only a partial harvest from the front yard garden. The vegetables are even bigger than they look in the photo.

This is a zucchini! It is eight inches high and nineteen inches around.

Generally, I only give food scraps to the worms in my two worm bins, but I decided to share one of the big zucchini’s with them. After all, their ceaseless work contributed significantly to making the garden what it is today.

The Wonders of Nature

Several of the rituals conducted during Amma‘s programs use flower petals. Today, I was working with a group of people who were taking the petals off of carnations. In the process of doing that, we removed the stamen from each flower.

We soon discovered that the stamens were very different from each other even though the flowers themselves were all carnations. It was as if every flower was unique. I took a few minutes to take photos of eight of them.

Someone commented that they looked like roots of teeth. One of the men working with us said that when something in nature looks like something else those two things often have some kind of relation to each other. We wondered if there was any chance that the stamens had any medicinal value related to alleviating tooth pain. Just thinking of the possibility that that might be true was wondrous.

Wordless Wednesday

A Glimpse into the Worm Bin

Vermi-composting is a process by which worms make high quality fertilizer for the garden. I have a large outdoor worm bin as well a smaller bin that stays in the house during the winter and on my deck the rest of the year. I blend most of the food scraps I put into both worm bins, but last week I decided to put some bigger pieces of food in the small bin so that I could watch the worms at work.

First, I gave them part of a large round zucchini that had been partially cooked. I tore it into 4 pieces before I put it into the bin. Within 36 hours nothing remained of the zucchini except the skin and the hard stalk that had connected it to the plant.

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Next, I decided to put an acorn squash that had fallen off of the vine and was starting to deteriorate in the bin. Again, I tore it into four pieces. This time the vegetable was raw so it is taking considerably longer for the worms to eat it.

I took these photographs over a three-and-a-half day period. It is clear that only the seeds and probably the skin will be left when the worms finish their meal!

My Oh My!

I’ve had a garden in my front yard the last few years, but it has never been like this before. Maybe it is because of the new raised beds, or the extraordinarily hot weather, or the vermi-compost.

Whatever the reason, I am marveling at what is unfolding in front of my eyes! There have been times when everything was growing so fast that I wondered if I was living in the Jack and the Beanstalk story.

This may not amaze those of you who are used to successful gardens but this is the first time I’ve had this experience!

One of the things I am especially happy about is that the garden is full of bees. Most are bumblebees but there are honey bees as well. Two years ago bees were rarely to be found in my garden.