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Frog Blog...
May 2010
May is definitely my favourite month. The first summer flowers are out, and all plants are growing vigorously, but still with the fresh bright greenness of spring.
May this year is especially beautiful, because the rhododendrons and azaleas are all flowering at their "textbook" time, instead of a month early, in April, as they have done in recent years. Tulips too were later than usual, and are still making a fabulous show. No matter how many english springs I've seen, I'm always impressed by how quickly the plants get going. A few warm days, and you can nearly see the grass growing. This is always a busy time for us, gardeners, with lawns growing almost faster than we can cut them, and weeds springing up overnight. Garden wildlife too is responding to the warmer weather, and in many cases "garden wildlife" means "pests". Aphids are multiplying on tender shoots everywhere, and slugs, snails and creepy crawlies of all kinds are getting busy.
If you are lucky enough to have a garden which has been pesticide free for a number of years, these creatures quite quickly fall prey to their natural predators, but remember, the pest numbers have to build up a bit before the predators can really get going. This is the time when an organic gardener needs a strong stomach, watching the buds of a favourite rose quickly smother with tiny new-born aphids, and not a ladybird in sight yet. If you can't bear to wait, it's really useful to have a biological control up your sleeve. Just hang a little bag of native ladybird larvae in the affected bush, and you can watch them munching away on your aphids within hours. So much more satistying than waiting impatiently for nature to catch up, and it gets us past that nail-biting time when so many gardeners "crack", and run down to Homebase for the oh so tempting pest gun, and that way upset the natural balance of the garden for the whole summer. Of course it's not just ladybirds that eat aphids, and a family of hungry blue tits in the garden will consume thousands in a few hours. Hoverfly and lacewing larvae too are fierce aphid predators, and please remember that when they are young, these larvae are tiny, often too small to see. It makes me sad to think of the millions of times that well-meaning gardeners have sprayed insecticide onto aphid colonies which already had ladybird, hoverfly and lacewing larvae working amongst them, which would have brought them under control within days.
Slugs and snails can be devastating pests at this time, chewing up tender shoots and even stripping the skin off clematis stems, or cutting of pea and bean stems at ground level, in an appearantly wanton trail of destruction. Traditional slug pellets have devastated the populations of all the natural predators of slugs and snails, and there have been until recently few very effective alternatives. A garden pond, with a healthy frog and toad population of course works wonders. If you are not lucky enough to have one of these, then consider trying the new type of slug pellets containing ferric phosphate, which are mainly wildlife friendly, and said to work well. Frognal Gardens is experimenting with these now. Watch this space!
For an enclosed space, like a trough, pot, or raised vegetable bed, you can use the special copper tape, which creates a barrier which slugs and snails are reluctant to cross. It's quite expensive, but if used to enclose smallish areas, can be cost effective. But remember, if you have put the tape around the rim of a pot, don't then forget about it and let leaves or stems trail onto the ground or surrounding plants, because snails will simply use these as a "bridge" over the barrier tape. I've even seen baby snails climbing along a single thread of spider web to reach a tasty plant! Finally, a tested and very good control for slugs is nemasys slug killer, which is completely safe to all other wildlife, and completely lethal to slugs. Unfortunately it doesn't work against snails, which are just as bad, and usually even more destructive than slugs in Hampstead Gardens.
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