Brightening Up

The tantalisingly slow return of the sunshine has finally tempted the garden out of its long green slumber, and more varieties are appearing for us to pick. The brightest and most cheery flower at the moment is the geum Totally Tangerine, and the loveliest and most Rapunzel-leaning-from-her-tower is the tumbling white clematis montana; four buckets were picked on Monday for a florist customer to create dreamy wedding installations with, and we have been putting it in buckets for shop florists too - we love to think of the clematis adding its wild grace to the bouquets in people’s homes. Sweet rocket is also appearing in abundance all over the garden, and the camassia beds are starry with white and blue. This week we have also been waging war on slugs, which don’t seem to have taken any notice of the nematodes which we applied to the soil a few weeks ago - perhaps we were too late, but until then it had been too dry to apply them. For two weeks we fretted about using slug pellets again now that we have our mini chickens, but the organic Sluggo variety we use are considered to be reliably safe for wildlife and animals… except for slugs. Our minds were made up when the saleswoman in the garden centre recounted a visit from the Sluggo sales rep, who apparently shook out some slug pellets into her hand and ate them! Not, perhaps, what we’ll be doing ourselves. But the pellets are being taken, and not by the chickens, and the slug damage is gradually decreasing. In the meantime, trays of vulnerable seedlings are biding their time on raised walls, out of the way of the voracious little beasties.