Does anyone know anything about gardening?

Today

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You can get copper rings that you assemble around the plant and press into the soil. They are very effective up to the point that the leaves bend over the ring and touch the surrounding soil.

I've found copper-impregnated fibrous mats to be quite effective too, but harder to prevent folds or puckers allowing ingress.

Looking for some help - on a patch of compacted earth in front of the garden gate and next to one of our raised beds there has recently appeared a couple of patches of what looks like black and green mould/lichen. The proximity to veg patch slightly worrying, does this look familiar to anyone/any advice? All I can see online is a suggestion to aerate but that doesn't strike me as likely to solve the problem... it seems to be restricted to bits of earth that have been compacted by regular traffic and the grass worn away...

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Does anyone have any spare pots (plastic is fine)?

Ideally at least a foot wide / in diameter.

Cheers

I do. I can take photos later. How many are you after?

What's the best way to repel slugs from a veg patch (on a raised bed)? Would prefer to avoid non-organic deterrents as we will be eating the veg! A LOT of slugs come out when it rains so need something stronger than eggshells or coffee grounds.

Only 2.

Although if you've got a couple more spare that you don't need I'd take 4.

Thanks

Slug pellets. You can get organic ones.

People also say copper.

I'm not that convinced, but if you have enough spare copper wire you could try wrapping it around the raise bed.

Not sure how many I have that are a foot across. Will report back later.

Cheers. If not, no worries. Thought it was worth asking before pottering along to homebase.

I found two decent sized Rosemary plants on the street. My other half gave me a withering look and said they looked dead.

I'm hopeful they can be saved, but I think they need a bit more room and some fresh soil.

Plant Marigolds around your veg and invest in some amphibians, fowl & hedgehogs.

Copper rings around the base of plants, pressed into the earth so there are no gaps underneath, work brilliantly.

However if you're going to go to the effort of wrapping wire all around the circumference of a raised bed, why not add a 9v battery and go nuclear?

https://youtu.be/ZoBeKS64_xc

I've never had good results from copper tape, etc and although I love the ingenuity of the wire above, there must be stacks of eggs/tiny slugs already in the soil?
Last season we tried some Nematodes and this really worked, essentially you're just increasing the number of natural slug predators per sqm no end. This kind of stuff:
http://www.slugoff.co.uk/killing-slugs/nematodes

I'm not sure how much an impact slug pellets have on the veg you grow, and therefore you, but there are organic ones like andyp says (that said Bordeaux mix was organic too so I take organic not to necessarily signify safety). But to answer your quesiton I'm not sure there is one single solution. I think it best to try a combo of all of those above and maybe stick in some slug traps as well. People use beer in the traps but you can also use a water, flour, sugar and yeast combo which may be cheaper. It has the same effect. These need to be changed every few days (hopefully easily if the patch is in your garden).

You can still use egg shells - I think they are good at protecting smaller plants. Copper tape is good too but if your bed is large it'll cost a pretty penny to do a full circuit.

Water in nematodes are effective too - but again are expensive.

And last but by no menas least get out of a night with a torch and squish them. You'll need ot do it frequently and you won't beleive how many you find and then how many you see on the next night, and the next night ...

Good luck.

Ferric phosphate pellets are effective on slugs and acceptable for organic farming, I think - they break down to leave iron and phosphate in the soil.

The nematodes are very effective but the main impact isn't felt in the first year, since they attack the slugs earlier in the lifecycle.

Ugh, really not looking forward to the ongoing Slug War... it's those hefty Spanish slugs that really take some effort to squish/stab/splat. Traps just don't get enough numbers, got some resident toads but they just aren't big enough / hungry enough to make much of a dent either. I find them pretty tiresome, and they kill my favourite plants.

I have a question about compost - thinking to add some (quite a lot) of grape vine. RHS recommends 50% green stuff and 50% brown (woody, cardboard etc) - I've tended to only put green in and it's fine, hasn't gone slimy. We have quite a lot of borage and the compost bin gets the sun so it goes down amazingly quick. I'm thinking the vine might be useful as woody stuff, but I don't have a shredder, and chopping it all up into tiny pieces by hand is super tiresome. Will it get broken down eventually by the small beasties, or will it mess up the compost with ridiculous long fibrous bits if I just put it in as is?

I guess that if you are constructing a new raised bed then you are creating a barrier around a slug-free bed (since the bed didn't previously exist). Eventually I suppose that baby slugs (which live underground, for those that don't know) might migrate through the soil - but if the surface that you build the bed on is nice and compacted this migration might be slowed or prevented. Raised beds seem an effective measure anyway (which if underground migration was consistent, you would expect not to be the case), so it'd be good to learn more about factors influencing underground slug movement!

lines starting with aHowever if you're going to go to the effort of wrapping wire all around >the circumference of a raised bed, why not add a 9v battery and go nuclear? 'greater than' >denote quoted text

Tried this last year - worked a treat for the first week or two, but corroded quickly and killed the battery. Perhaps a car battery would work better?

If it's like sticks it'll take years. If you can bash it until it's a fibrous mass it will compost reasonably quickly.

Alternatively, why not burn it and mix the ash into your soil or compost?

On the same not, any good caterpillar deterrents? My cucumbers are getting decimated, leaves look like lace...

Any good to you?

I'm in Herne Hill.

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Plastic grass in the gardening thread?

Hang your head in shame...

I am very proud of my plastic grass. An L shaped yard, 1.2m wide, by 4.5m long was never going to have a lawn. Before the fake grass it was a concrete shit hole. Now it's full of pots of colour, fruit and herbs, has my kids playing in it, has people eating in it and me sun bathing in it.

None of this transfornation would ever have occurred without the fake grass. Which my brother and I laid ourselves, compkete with odd layout, cutouts for drains and two tonne of sharp sand base. Not to mention the two foot deep drill holes through the concrete for drainage.

I love my fake lawn, it has given me a garden.