Kill the Slugs!

May 29, 2008 - It's been three days since we planted all of our babies into the ground. All was well until this morning when I went outside bright and early to water - this is what I found:

SOMETHING is eating our lettuce before us. And that's just not cool. Now, we had some suspicions that something was up the other day, as some of our beans are doing well, and others are basically dead.

Happy bean plant -

Very sad bean plant -

After a little investigation, Joe decided that it is probably slugs. We also realized that this is happening in one of the only beds that the chickens did not get allowed in for the free buffet before we planted. AND this is one of the only beds that has not been mulched. So we quickly put some pine needles around the plants, hoping that would deter the pests. If there is more damage tomorrow, I'm going to have to take more drastic measures - sand, or eggshells, or beer - there are apparently many ways to deal with slugs.

For a quick tour of the rest of the garden, we'll start with the peas. We still have only a very few peas thanks to our troubles early on. But what we do have are finally taking off. We're using branches as stakes - sort of inline with our whole environmentally friendly goals.

The zucchini is looking a little bit yellow. I mean, for someone whose never grown zucchini, I guess I really wouldn't know if it's supposed to be a yellowish green or not, but I'm guessing not. Hopefully the fertilizer I put on these guys this evening will help them out. The bed their in is probably the least fertile, as we didn't have any compost left and it's never been a garden before. So, we'll see what happens -

Happy beet plant! These are planted in the garden that my dad used to grow veggies in with lots of compost for years. So it's probably pretty good dirt.

Not sure if the cucumbers are happy or unhappy. They probably aren't getting enough sun because they are the closest to the giant pine tree in the backyard, which throws some shade on it the middle of the day. I'm hoping as we get more toward the longest day of the year the sun will hit a touch more and make the difference. May be wishful thinking. But as you can see, we used black plastic for mulch on these, and it seems to be working so far.

The tomatoes seem to be doing quite well - this is one of the brandywines and we need to come up with some sort of trellis system for these guys too. Something clever of course, because we can't do anything the normal way...

And that's the garden tour for today - we get to take it every morning and every morning there's something new to see, whether it's new sprouts, new leaves, or just holes in the lettuce. It's all signs of life, which is all exciting.