Well, I can’t resist them anyway.
On the way back from Slimbridge yesterday I called in at the garden centre in Ashchurch to see if they had anything I couldn’t buy closer to home, and came back with some quite nice things for the patio and yard, including a large hosta that was in their half-price sale. Today, apart from a trip to the supermarket for essential supplies (wine, chocolate biscuits, wine, tulips, and wine), and a quick meet-up with R for coffee and cake, I spent the whole day in the garden, doing more tidying, and planting up yesterday’s purchases.
Re the hosta, it would be more accurate to say that it was pot-bound in a very large plant pot, and that the plant itself should be large once this year’s growth comes through. Provided, of course, that the slugs don’t get it first. I’ve never had any success with hostas in the past, because we have slugs and snails here the size of small deer, and the stupid things think nothing of taking off the entire top growth of a hosta or lupin or whatever, and coming back repeatedly to do the same thing again and again, until the plant simply gives up hope and dies. And I won’t use poison on them, and I don’t have the stomach for the beer traps my mother used to swear by, so I’ve been reduced to trying all the supposedly foolproof folk remedies. None of which – garlic spray, wool pellets, crushed egg shells, etc. – have deterred the Shire’s Muntjac-sized molluscs in the slightest.
So, the hosta purchase must count as a triumph of hope over experience (or a wilful failure to learn from past mistakes: you decide). This time though, I’ve planted it in a rough-cast concrete pot which sits on gravel, and I’ve also topped the soil with a layer of the fine, sharp gravel you get for covering pond plant containers. Plus, I was told by the assistant at the garden centre that she’d been promised – by someone who had it from their aunt’s next-door-neighbour’s son-in-law’s friend, I believe – that the thing that slugs and snails really don’t like is garlic granules. And I had some garlic granules in the spice drawers in the kitchen, so I thought Yeah… whatever… why not? and shook a coating of those over the top of the aquatic gravel as well, just for luck. If none of that works, I may find that I have the stomach for some beer traps, after all.
Watch this space…
R: L2, C6, D7.
