Slug love, soggy soil and new book news

Hold on to your hats! The spring madness has officially begun. I am sowing seeds like my life depends on it.

Wood anemones

Even though this interminably rainy weather is showing no signs of letting up, the soil is now warming – and indeed is warmer than usual since we’ve also had unseasonably high temperatures this spring.

But I am still being quite careful about what I sow outdoors. There is a slug and snail plague to deal with: populations have exploded since conditions which are perfect for seed sowing (warm, damp) are almost always perfect for slugs and snails too.

The RHS has endured much mockery for their plea to love your slugs. And I too find it hard to summon up much fondness for them: they are the most unlovely of creatures, not unlike animated snot and about as welcome.

But I got into gardening to nurture living things, not to murder them. I am less and less inclined to kill the creatures which attack my plants, and wherever possible I have found other strategies: I sow beans, peas, beetroot and sweetcorn into mouse-proof cages, for example, which may require a bit of work to build but once constructed are incredibly effective and last many seasons. And they are so much better than mouse traps, which can be horribly cruel and usually catch the mouse only after it’s had a good feast on your seeds anyway.

Quite hard to love…

With slugs, I’m just really careful about what I sow outdoors. They adore seedlings (obvs) and do most damage when they’re eating young leaves too as it’s at this stage when they’ll kill the whole plant – they’ll raze a row of just-emerged lettuce seedlings to the ground in a night.

It follows that if you raise your seedlings to robust young plants before you plant them outdoors, they will be both less attractive to slugs, and more able to withstand a little damage. When seedlings are growing up safely in pots on your windowsill or on the shelf in your greenhouse, it’s harder for slugs to find them in the first place and even if they do, since you’re checking the pots every day you will spot them very quickly.

There are some exceptions. Slugs dislike any vegetable with peppery leaves – so that’s radishes, rocket, mizuna, onions and American land cress. They also steer clear of most varieties of red-leaved vegetables (including lettuces), apparently because the anthocyanins they contain taste bitter too. They don’t like parsnips, either, or vegetables that taste a bit odd like carrots and coriander – though these last are less certain and they sometimes have a nibble in plague years like this one.

So all of the above you can risk sowing direct outdoors; everything else I raise inside, under cover, where I can keep an eye on them till they’re filling a 10cm (4”) pot comfortably. At that point they’re able to cope outside.

American land cress: slug hate it

This year, the wet is an extra problem to add to the balance, mind. Seeds sown in soggy soil, especially when further rain is making it even soggier, tend to rot off before they can germinate, however warm the temperatures.

So your only real option is to dry out the soil as much as you can. Again, you can sow indoors where you have more control over water levels: outdoors, cloches are your friends. Mine have been doing sterling service: they don’t keep all the water out but keep things just dry enough to prevent your seeds from drowning. Ironically, you do have to keep an eye on the ground beneath to make sure it doesn’t dry out too much – I water under my cloches once or twice a week.

If you don’t have cloches, find a large sheet of clear polythene – the big sheets used for wrapping new washing machines and the like are invaluable – and simply lay it on the ground, weighing down the edges with bricks. Do this two weeks ahead of sowing and the ground beneath will have a chance to dry out: remove it to sow, then replace, but this time raised up on little piles of bricks carefully placed between your rows of seeds, like an ersatz cloche which you can remove once the weather dries out again.

In other news: this week is publication week! In a few days – on Thursday, in fact – you’ll be able to get your hands on your very own copy of my little booky-wook, RHS Greener Gardening: Vegetables. It’s all the experience I’ve painstakingly collected over more than 30 years of growing my own veg: and most recently, using sustainable techniques from sowing into paper pots, to using peat-free compost, to saving my own seed.

Sustainable veg growing at your fingertips

I’m really proud of it. There are lots of little details which you won’t find in other veg growing books: every ‘how to grow’ page has details of how to save the seeds as standard, for example, since I think seed-saving should be as much of a routine part of growing your own veg as pricking out, or putting up beanpoles, or harvesting.

There are plans for building your own greenhouse and recipes for making your own potting mix; tips for keeping your harvest constant right through the year, and recommendations for which veg varieties to choose if you garden in containers. Plus step-by-step, easy-to-use instructions for growing dozens of different kinds of veg – and all sustainably, with a light touch, to leave no trace.

I’m chatting to the publisher to see if I can bring you a few excerpts just to let you know what you’ll find inside: but if you can’t wait, you can grab your copy here. I’d love to know what you think!

In the meantime, there are SO many more seeds to sow (the first beans for our growalong are going in this week!) and I am doing a rain dance backwards in the hope that it’ll budge the jet stream along a bit and give us some relief from all the wet stuff. Hope you aren’t too inundated and get outside for a while this week. Happy gardening!