Battle stations

Everyone has their own idea of what constitutes the first sign of spring.  Some might note the opening of the first crocus or daffodil.  Others, the lengthening days and lighter evenings, or the songs and courtship rituals of the garden birds. 

In my case, I know that it’s spring when, following an extended Christmas truce, the ceaseless war on the slugs, aphids and other garden pests resumes.  I renounced chemical weaponry many years ago, but don’t think this makes my garden or allotment any sort of haven for the sap-suckers and slimers out there.  On the contrary, it just makes their deaths all the more gory and gruesome.

When I decided to write this post, I searched in vain for notes from a presentation I made to former work colleagues quite a few years ago, entitled “Pest Control in the Organic Garden”, delivered to show I had been paying attention and had learnt something during a training session on delivering training.  At its conclusion, colleagues present very probably changed their view of me from “mostly harmless” to “dangerous psychopath”.  From what I remember, it started something like this:

“When you tell people that you’re an organic gardener, they tend to think this means you’re a bit of an old hippy, a gentle, chilled-out being at peace with all living creatures.  This is wrong.  When you think of organic gardening, think of The Good Life.  Then imagine it remade by Quentin Tarantino.”

Picking up the movie references, the audience were introduced, via overheard projector, to a cartoon line-up of the Usual Suspects; slug, aphid, caterpillar, leatherjacket and one other I forget (that’ll be the little insignificant guy who turns out to be – spoiler alert! - the arch villain at the end). 

The remainder of the talk, for time was limited, looked at just one of these notorious criminals – the slug.  I busted the myth of the supposedly cute snail (double layer overheard projection of a snail – removing the top sheet with the shell reveals it to be merely a slug in disguise – ah-ha!), and proceeded, via the Magic Roundabout and the Tarantino reference to “Kill Brian – Part I”. 

In this I explained the workings of various slug-proof barriers, such as crushed egg-shells (fatal lacerations), wood ash (lime burning) and copper (electrocution) and of the beer trap.  Slugs have utterly failed to embrace the principles of the Temperance Movement, so it remains delightfully easy to lure scores of them to their doom in a pit of alcohol.  In addition to drunkenness, they are also prey to the sin of gluttony and, as I explained to an increasingly queasy audience, can allegedly be exploded on a diet of dry bran.

It was “Kill Brian – Part 2” that caused most disquiet, however, dealing as it did with mortal combat.  Readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now.  Rather than relying on the overhead projector, this part used props.  Specifically ‘Plastercine’ slugs, realistic-looking slugs loving hand-crafted by myself for the occasion, a torch (small and battery operated, not the large wood and tar flaming type, the latter being used for hunting ogres, not slugs), a sharpened stick and a pair of scissors. 

I explained, with probably more relish than someone of absolute sanity, how one could venture out into the garden on dark, damp evenings, armed with the torch and either the stick or the scissors, find slugs about their slimy business and either impale them (touché!) or cut them in half.  Like so (gave demonstration, using above-mentioned props).  No-one actually passed out, not even my colleague Samantha, who had herself delivered a fine exposition of the principles and practice of being a Drama Queen - specifically ‘the strop’ and ‘the flounce’ - but it was a close thing.

So once again, the battle-lines are drawn.  At present, I feel I  may have the advantage.  My allies are gathering.  The mild winter and my diligence in protecting them from what frost there has been means there are already battalions of ladybirds patrolling the garden in search of aphids.  I saw the first of the hoverflies (also aphid-eaters) on an open crocus yesterday.  Also, the ponds are seething with frogs, who dine on slugs (at least they do if they are actually larger than the slugs).  I shall say no more about the frogs’ current activities than I cannot post up-to-date photos of them without changing the status of this blog to one with “adult content”.  Indeed, Caligula might blush.  But as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war.

Post mortem

Two days on from the exams, and looking back, it's easy to think now of how much better a job I could have done of some of the questions.  In fact, even as I drove through the college gates on Monday afternoon, the word "pericarp" sprang into my mind, just as it had failed to do that morning while I was trying to sketch the cross-section of a "young dicotyledonous root".  It's a moot point whether I ought even to have been drawing this, as the question, from what I recall, had asked for a drawing to show "the internal structure of a young dicotyledon root", and at least one fellow student took this to mean a longitudinal section through the root; it's always a challenge to avoid such a drawing having the look of Pompeian graffiti about it!

I certainly shouldn't have spent the last five minutes of the final paper on propagation, drawing a sketch of rose rootstocks being "stooled" to increased their number, as the question I was answering specifically asked for details of propagating suckering shrubs by division., but by the time I'd done the basics of the sketch, that was half my page for that answer covered, and most of my time used up.  I found that the worst paper. 

With RHS exams, you have to answer all the questions, and I find the best strategy with this type of exam is just to start at the beginning and answer the questions in order as far as possible, but skip past anything awkward, and come back to it after picking the lower-hanging fruit, so to speak.  So I answered the first question, the first half of the second question, decided to revisit the second part of question 2, turned over to question 3, decided to come back to it, read question 4, decided to come back to that too, turned over to question 5, read it and moved on the question 6, which fortunately seemed to be asking about something with which I had a passing acquaintance.  Hopefully some of what I've written regarding questions 2(b) to 5 bears some relation to what the examiner was asking about.

Despite that last evil paper I'm keen to continue studying, and have to decide whether to take on the RHS level 2 practical course, or stay in the classroom and do RHS level 3.  At the moment I'm leaning towards the practical course starting in the autumn, with the option of tackling level 3 the year after that.  An in the meantime, there's the college trip to the Netherlands in May to look forward to.  And that doesn't involve exams!

Exam day

Let's see if, after an entire day of RHS exam papers, I actually have any mental energy remaining to put a blog entry together...

That'll be "no" then.

The Day After Tomorrow

The unusually mild winter has come to a sharp end, and it would appear that the weather gods have decided to put their efforts into encouraging me to get on with my revision, having turned the paths out of the house into sheet ice.  Being a tall person without great natural balance, I hate ice with a passion, so the only sensible course of action is to stay indoors with my notes, and get on with revising for my RHS exams on Monday.

It's astonishing to think that it's almost a year since I started my studies at Reaseheath, and that the exams on Monday will be the end of the course.  The last lecture sessions on Wednesday involved much contemplation of past papers and discussion of "exam technique", most of the class being mature students who probably hadn't been in an exam hall for thirty years or so.  A couple of us who started the course at the half-way stage know only too well what to expect.  The papers are quite tough and time is short, but despite this, I did well in the summer and managed to pass all of the four papers, three "with commendation".  Having a very long-standing reputation as a smart-arse to maintain, I would like to manage a similar performance again. 

The ice problem here made national news yesterday; standing at the back door there was an eerie and disturbing cracking sound coming from the big trees at the end of the garden, which were smothered with a rind of shiny ice.  The cold also drove a fieldfare into the garden to raid some of the remaining crab apples.

Today the sun has been out but the trees were still covered in ice for much of the morning and it was bitterly cold when I ventured over to the bird feeders, to find them also festooned with icicles.  The snowdrops, despite being in quite a sheltered spot haven't enjoyed the last few days at all, but inside the greenhouse it was warm, and I was pleased to see that some of the ladybirds I found sheltering in the olive tree foliage earlier in the week were alive and well, and happily snuggled up on some young mint plants. 

Hopefully they'll stay at that end of the greenhouse and away from the Sarracenias, or that'll be a pretty disasterous "friendly fire" episode on my part.

Sowing the first seeds of 2012

Today it is freezing cold up here in North Staffs, dull and overcast, and we've had snow - not huge amounts, but enough to be a shock after such a mild winter.  Putting out some bird feed this morning, I noticed clusters of ladybirds sheltering in the leaves of my small pot-grown olive tree, so gathered the little critters up and moved them into the greenhouse, where hopefully they will find somewhere warmer to spend these frosty nights.

Yesterday, in the sunshine, the greenhouse was fabulously warm despite the cold temperatures outside, and I made a start on sowing some seeds.  Although they can be direct sown, I always start my broad beans off indoors, as our soil can be too wet to work early in the spring, and have devised a good home-made, recycled "root-trainer" type system from small supermarket mushroom containers, which are precisely the right size to hold 6 cardboard toilet-roll tubes (or half kitchen-roll tubes).  The tubes stand upright in the mushroom tray, are filled with compost to within about 2cm of the top (multipurpose will do for big seeds like broad beans).  The seed beans then go in and are covered with more compost, and while germination is awaited, another mushroom tray sits over the top of the tubes to make sure the beans aren't robbed out by mice. 

When it's warm enough to open the greenhouse and take a photo of this cunning contraption, I'll add it here.

There it is - shown left, with six tubes fitted in perfectly, and right with rodent-proof lid!  Small wood-mice occasionally sneak into the greenhouse and in previous years have excavated the beans out of the tubes for winter food - starting the beans indoors solved this, but tended to produce rather leggy, soft plants which even after hardening off didn't appreciate moving out into the garden when there was still frost about. Once the beans have germinated, the mice seem not to be interested, so the lid can (indeed must) come off, though a clear plastic cover can replace it for things which need more warmth than broad beans.

This design also works for runner and French beans, or sweet peas - the cardboard tube is simply planted out with the plant when the time comes and in time rots away.  The only problems I've found are that as the tubes are both absorbent and porous, you need to ensure adequate watering, and occasionally small fungi grow on the outside of the tubes, though with no detriment to the beans in my experience.

I've also sown the first couple of batches of salad leaves, also using recycled supermarket packaging as seed trays.  I do have seed trays, but have to confess to getting a small, geeky buzz from finding a use for stuff which would otherwise go for landfill.  The mushroom trays combine really well, for example, with the deeper clear plastic trays supermarkets often sell smaller joints of meat in to make neat little propagators which are great for raising small numbers of tomato and pepper seeds, herbs (like basil) and half-hardy annuals as they fit perfectly on the window sill.

I start my spring-planted onion sets off indoors these days too, using conventional module trays.  Allowing them to make some roots before planting out seems to minimise that annoying problem of birds pulling them out of the soil (possibly mistaking the tips of the dry outer leaves for worms), as they get well fastened-in to the soil much more quickly.

This year's seed compost is New Horizon Organic and Peat Free, as I haven't been able to find the dehydrated coir blocks used last year, very successfully, for sale in any of the local garden centres so far this year, but did find this compost (which certaily feels nice and handles well - germination report to follow when it happens) for sale in the Wilkinsons store in Hanley at a very reasonable price.

So with seeds sown, although it now looks very much like winter out there, to me it feels like spring!