A bucket of slaters

I've been having trouble growing anything from seed. As soon as my pea shoots clear the soil, they're chomped off. Same with the radishes, leafy greens, beans etc. They only thing that isn't being routinely eaten is my coriander. It turns out over winter I created the perfect breeding ground for slaters. I always thought they were quite harmless little critters, but in large quantities they are weapons of mass garden destruction! I have set out to eradicate them. Unfortunately, it's not easy. Again, it's one of those things that can be controlled with noxious chemicals that you wouldn't want anywhere near your food crop. I recently heard you can create a barrier with lime and sawdust mixed together to protect certain plants. But I have chosen an old remedy. Oranges!

 

 

 

 

I am drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice every day and forcing my husband to do the same. The leftover half oranges go into the garden, skin side up. This orange I put out in the garden about an hour ago, you can see the slaters starting to gather around it already:

 

 

 

 

Each day I look inside the orange halves and hundreds of slaters have gathered underneath them.

 

 

 

Then I tip them out into a bucket:

 

After a week of this, there must be thousands of slaters in my bucket. I heard an experienced horticulturist once say he doesn't think worm farms are very good, so he built a slater farm to help compost his scraps. Wish I could give him my bucket of the little destroyers. You could feed them to your chooks, they'd love them... or a neighbours' chooks! I have no idea how long I am going to have to keep squeezing oranges for, but I think the population is starting to reduce! And my vitamin C levels are great!

Garlic maths

At the end of March I planted some garlic. 'Some' turned out to be about 150 cloves of garlic. So now I have about 150 strapping garlic plants that are just months away from harvest:

It's looking really good. Some of course are bigger than others and seeing as I bought bulbs from two different people and then received a bowl of homemade-grown garlic from my Italian neighbour, I have no idea which is which. I might just have to wait and see and then save the biggest to replant next year. I will take my harvest queue from my neighbour, who told me when to plant. her garlic looks amazing, the plants are the size of leeks! But I'm happy with the way mine are going compared to last years sad lot that were planted too late into sand and only grew one small clove each!

I now need to calculate how many I need to keep for a year of garlic in the kitchen and how many to save to replant!

Meanwhile, on the verge...

You may remember that less than a year ago, we transformed the half dead and compacted patch of grass on our verge into this:

 

Then we added some pine bark and planted out some low-growing Australian native plant tube stock (scaveola, conostylis, grevillea, kangaroo paws) and it looked like this:

 

 

Well, nine months later the plants have grown, we lost a few and along the way we've planted some more here and there (knobby club rush, cushion bush, pimlea, banksia) and now it looks like this: 

 

I'm ready to add some more bird-attracting plants while we're getting good rains to help them settle in before summer. (banksia blechnifolia, eremophila Amber Carpet and decipiens, eutaxia obovata or bacon and egg plant, grevillea gingin gem and kangaroo paws Mangles and Pink Beauty) I expect that in another 12 to 18 months our verge will be a carpet of flowering native plants. Here's my tube stock:

Not only are the plants beautiful, they will provide a much-needed food source for native birds and bees in the metropolitan area. On top of that, I will hand water them through their first couple of summers and after that, they should be able to survive on rainfall alone. The tube stock, although small, does grow quickly and tends to settle in better than more established plants.

 

It's really important to provide food and habitat for our native animals and insects in the city. Imagine if every 10th house on our streets replaced their patchy, unmowed, ugly, water and fertiliser-guzzling lawn with a native verge garden. It would be like having thousands of acres of bush reserves in our cities. That could only be a good thing for our environment right?

 

Now, if I've inspired you to plant out your own native verge, even if it's just a couple of ground-covering grevilleas and a few kangaroo paws, stay tuned for my next post on how best to plant your tube stock!