Usually I leave the slugs to the bluetongue. I’d hate to starve him (or her) into deciding to live somewhere else. But he’s a bit too well fed, and I’m not. A cup with an inch of beer, buried so the rim is at the soil surface, overnight collected all these. The chooks will feast on beer marinated slugs.
But the cabbage moths have arrived, and I think that’s about the end for this year. We’ve had a good three months of harvesting broccolini, cauliflowers, kale, pak choi, napa cabbage, mustard. But from now on it’s not worth it, at least not here in the sub-tropics.
The grasshoppers love kale, but that’s ok, because the chooks love grasshoppers…
There are many, many organic remedies for cabbage moth caterpillars (and the web moth caterpillars that will be next to arrive). There are nets and traps and fake moths and eggshells and trichogramma wasps and dipel. But the only one I reckon is worth the time and effort for results is timing.
Yeah, you think you’re so on top, strutting around in the pecan tree that shades our verandah and overlooks the garden. Stealing chook eggs, stealing pawpaws and bananas and pumpkins and taro, scratching up the mulch, even getting into the bread dough proving on the verandah table. You wait. Come the zombocalypse, you’re dinner.
This is the boy, and it’s hard to capture his true beauty in a photo. He is a beautiful satiny blue-black and his eyes really are that colour. And this is the girl. She came inside to try to steal tomatoes and couldn’t figure out how to get out again.
It’s such a good disguise. It looks just like a ladybeetle. If I didn’t catch it actually in flagrante eating the leaves on my squash, I would think it was a good guy.
I have Oceans Eleven being enacted in my garden. I’ve got just nineteen pea seeds up so far this year! I thought it might be birds getting them before they germinated, so I put some net over the boxes in the shadehouse. But they still got got. So I moved the boxes out into one of my fortress fenced garden beds. But they still got got. So I planted all…
I wonder if you can see this? It was stunning to see but hard to photograph. This is looking from my verandah down at the gum trees in the early morning light, and they are covered in cobwebs! Hundreds of them. There’s a major convention of spiders happening at our place. And we have no mozzies. No sign of the mozzie plague that is supposedly happening all over Australia…