We got the ducks to get rid of the slugs. But obviously we can't have informed them of their function in life.
Trev told me, 'They'd be at risk of becoming magnetic.'
He'd watched them start at one end of my garden and throw down every snail pellet in sight. They're non-toxic, based on iron and in no danger of dying from anything but my left foot.
We have a large slug population, and they make me think more fondly of snails, who have a nice slime free zone to grab hold of them by and throw them in a bucket. These seem impervious to everything I've thrown at them - all the usual beer and vegemite traps, orange peels have done little to dampen their enthusiasm for my seedlings. I've taken to halving plastic bottles and pressing them into the soil around the plants to exclude them, though the ducks saw them as a personal obstacle course and challenge and tipped them all over.
It's my own fault we have so many slugs, I use enormous amounts of mulch and it's been very wet (though, to be honest that part hasn't been up to my personal responsibility).
Then the ducks ate my strawberries, knocked off the asparagus and gone thrown out of eden and into the bottom grassy area with their bath soon to follow. It was probably good timing. We've been witness to the weirdest of duck perversions (he kept mounting her head), but he's recently come to the conclusion he needed a 180 degree change in the arrangements and is out there looking very proud of himself.
But Trev did warn me that in his experience ducks weren't work a word that rhymes very much the same.
3 comments:
Ah, the animals are the very best home entertainment centre aren't they? My chickens are extremely mad at me because it is cold here now. And that must be because of something I've done. Our roo is now at the age of consent and has decided that mounting everyone over and over is his hobby. The hens just look at me balefully - can't he go to freezer camp like the last one. Alas, no, for we want chicks next spring.
Don't you just love baby ducklings. So very cute! My daughters school has an incubator and have successfully hatched out 8 baby ducklings. We now have one which is 4 weeks old. It's like having a pet shadow. Big mistake only asking for one so will have to get one or two more and hope that Fluffy the duck will like them. As for slugs and snails i think the ABC gardening website should have some information. I think it was their show where i first heard of using espresso coffee in a spray, which a think acts on their nervous system. Hope this helps
Hi! I just discovered your very interesting site. I dumped several wheel-barrows full of leaves on my garden last winter and wound up with slugs, too. I picked them all spring, and in a backyard of maybe 400 square feet (37 square meters), picked and killed over 8000. I tried mulching with broken eggshells, sawdust, and surrounding plants with pine cone and sweet gum pods (very sharp and spiny). The mulching techniques really did not help much. My soil was high in iron and phosphorus, so I suspect someone in this house in the past had been down this road before. I wound up just picking them up (eventually buying disposable latex gloves for that purpose), and drowning them in a jar of hot, soapy water nightly. I probably looked pretty crazy wandering the backyard with a flashlight (rechargeable batteries) and jar every evening, but eventually the picking, using trap plants (they liked certain radishes better than my lettuces), and summer heat solved the problem.
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