Are you growing your own veg for the first time this year, and are you finding that your home-grown lettuces are being shredded by slugs?
Are they being slaughtered by snails?
Are they so disgusting that you are throwing most of them on the compost heap, rather than eating them?
Have you tried coffee? Citrus peel? Copper tape? Egg shells? Or any of the other multitude of so-called slug prevention items, all of which are completely useless, as I have already demonstrated in an earlier article?
Today, I am going to share with you my answer to this problem, which gives perfect, 100% protection for your salad.
It takes a bit of setting up, mind: you will need to buy or repurpose the following items, or something very similar:
1) cheap shelving.
2) some plastic guttering, preferably square section
How To Do It:
Assemble the guttering into a square or rectangle. Sink it into the soil so it ends up at ground level. Fill it with water, Clear out everything inside the "moat", set up the shelves, put trays of lettuce on the shelves and there you go!
Fantastic clean lettuce, 100% slug free!
Of course, there's always a wee bit more to it, that these simple instructions would suggest: for a start, you'll need to seal the joints in the guttering, and it takes quite a while to get the guttering set exactly level.
Plus it is essential to clear out all slugs from within the moat, before you even start!
You do then have to keep the moat topped up, but of course you are watering the lettuce trays every day anyway, so that's not difficult.
As you can see, my shelves are actually one of those cheap plastic greenhouses, and as I already had the old, damaged, plastic skin, I cut the top off, and added it as a "lid", to stop birds sitting on the frame and pooing on my lettuce.
In case you are wondering why on earth I decided to do this, it was just a proof of concept, to show a friend how it would work: they have now moated their entire new raised veg bed, with great success.
And I have now a perfect salad bar, nice and handy for the back door!
The gravel is also making a pretty good barrier. All the same I would put some sulphuric acid in the moat just to be sure! (Only joking.... salt solution)
ReplyDelete