Back in the garden

Well, it seems I am feeding a local population of slugs.

Here's what they've done to my beans.

...and my swiss chard.

These plants can take some damage at this stage, but if the growing tip gets chomped, it takes forever (if ever) for the poor plants to get back on their feet. Now, as you may have guessed, I'm not a big pesticide fan. My method for dealing with leaf eating insects is to coat the leaves with ashes until the plants are far enough along that they can out grow all the munching. If only I had a source of ash...

...wait a sec!! Yes, yet another of the innumerable benefits of cooking with charcoal.

To get the ash to stick I first water the plants so the leaves are wet, then lightly dust them. This makes the leaves unpalatable to the poor slugs. I don't think they like crawling through the stuff. I'm sure if I was an overgrown slimeball booger of a creature, I wouldn't like it either. Sure, your garden will look like Vesuvius just went off, but it is only for a week or so.

Here's the chard all coated. Just re-apply the ash once it blows off or gets rained off. It also acts as a fertlizer -- how great is that? The other way to deal with slugs is to go out a night with a flashlight and pick them off the plants. But that's gross, and messes with my sleep, so forget it.

My crimson flowered fava beans are blooming nicely. Regular favas have white flowers with a black spot at the bottom. These babies are downright decorative. I never eat them -- it's kind of a pain -- but these are rare seeds and I like to keep them going. Call me Noah.

The Egyptian Onions have started forming their top bulbs -- they're in those little white sacks. One step closer to world domination.

Speaking of world domination, the lovage is now past six feet -- and the flower heads are just starting. It should be visible from Brockville in a couple of days.

The rhubarb is flowering and setting seed. It's a little unsightly, but I figure something probably eats those seeds, so why not let them grow? (This is why my garden usually looks like a disaster area.)

The horeradish is also setting seed. I leave that too.

Here are the seedpods from that kale that made it through the winter. I'm going to save them and see if we can get a winter hardy variety of Cavalo Nero established. This should take me until I'm 80, since it takes two years for a kale plant to go to seed, and it may take a few generations to get the trait stabilized, but it's good to have a project. I'll call it Cavalo Joe when it's all done.

Speaking of seeds, the sweet cicely seeds are hardening up now, so aren't any fun to munch on anymore. Once they turn black they're ready. Then I'll start sneaking them around the city to grow wherever they happen to sprout. (The world needs more sweet cicely. Look for it in a garden near you!)

The bay laurel that survived the winter is now starting to grow quickly. What a trooper! Not sure what to do with this guy when winter comes again. Leave it out and risk its death? Bring it in and never know if it really is some super strain that can survive any winter. Man, who thought gardening could be so stressful?

Last thing was to trim the side sprouts on the tomatoes. If you're trying to grow them up a pole, it's a good idea to pinch out these sprouts.

Once they're gone, the growth goes up instead of sideways and all over the place. This is more of a tidiness thing than a yield thing, so as you can imagine, I kind of bail on it later in the season -- still, it's good to aim for virtue at the start.

Happy gardening!