Two Days Dry, We’re Promised!

I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit fed up with this drought! The ‘experts’ never mention that gardeners wont have been using their hose pipes a great deal for the last five or six weeks, not to mention farmers, who wont have been irrigating anything. Also they have been saying the water will have been taken up by trees and not soaked in. Many trees have only just got leaves on them and wont have been taking up water. Surely the situation must be much better for water companies now!

What has been having a field day with all the rain are the molluscs. As someone who tries to protect their Hostas, Epimediums and other vulnerable plants without the use of too many toxic slug pellets, I use the capture and destroy method. I go out with a torch and collect a range of undesirable creatures. As well as slugs and snails you can catch Lily Beetles, Black Vine and other weevils and night caterpillars all about their destructive work, once it is dark. One does of course have to have a degree of determination to get out of

the arm chair and trudge round the garden stooping low in the rain. However, I am convinced I would have had considerably fewer Epimedium shoots and flowers and more holes in many plants had I not been so dedicated. The picture is one recent ice cream box of slugs, collected in the rain during a session of about an hour.