goodbye Pak choi

Linda Woodrow, in her superb Permaculture Home Garden book, observes that slugs absolutely adore pak choi. The evidence of this is getting just silly in my garden. Given the wet climate here on the West Coast, we get a lot of slugs but my beer traps have reduced the damage to more or less acceptable levels with the lettuces. But the pak choi I transplanted into the punga garden yesterday is nearly all gone!! And I found three baby slugs on them when doing an inspection in the rain today. Woodrow suggests that an excellent way to catch slugs is to leave a couple of pak choi leaves by the garden overnight and then pick it up (it will have slugs underneath) and feed the lot to the chooks. Which I would happily do if we had chooks.

Missing the garden

I've written a lot of posts not about my garden of late. That's cos I've spent very little time in it this last week. I miss it. I still get to inspect it every day, just small matter of paid work interfering with longer projects. Some beer traps are working very well to collect slugs. I'm less sure about at least one and probably more of them as the one year old apprentice pulled one up, spilt the beer down her frock and then sucked thoughtfully on the glass rim as she wandered round the rest of the garden. Changed her. Sending your baby to her childminder reeking of beer isn't cool. You shouldn't do it either. As for whether she drank dead slugs, I prefer not to reflect on that.

I do have lots of tiny seedlings in pots which will be ready for transplanting in 1-2 more weeks. I've had to play the identification game (mostly based on the pictures in the Kings Seed catalogue) as I didn't label any trays or pots. I'm confident that I have mizuna and corn salad, purple sprouting broccoli and kale. I also have arugula and then there are some pots where nothing has germinated and others yet to be identified. Of course I have more swiss chard. I can never have too much swiss chard. This winter my family will eat dark green leaves every single day and never get sick.