What can I do with my veg garden?

[Fnaar]

Been v. busy recently, and (as reported in another thread... the snail one, I think) have taken my eye off the ball garden-wise, allowing the slug-fiends to munch through everything I've planted, except the onions and garlic, which seem to be doing fine.

Now, I'm NOT looking for slug remedies (there's just loads of them) but I AM looking for ideas as to what I might plant to re-use the space, that the slugs won't go for... my gardening needs to be low maintenance, as I simply don't get the time to spend long hours leaning over my spade.

So, any ideas welcome for summer/winter planting, low maintenance, that yer slugs don't go for.

I know this place is full of garden-geniuses, and you've come up trumps before!

 

[rich p]

Tomatoes, courgettes, beetroot?

You may have to buy the plants rather than starting from seed.

 

[Globalti]

 

[Greedo]

 

[rich p]

Should you grow grass in a pot?

 

[Amanda P]

I like growing veg, but for the last four or five years, I've been away from home right through the spring, which makes it kinda difficult.

So I've grassed over half the veg plot and put in three small fruit trees (two apples and a fruiting cherry). I'm hoping these will produce edible stuff that won't be eaten by slugs, and require less effort on my part. So far I've had only one apple from the three of them, but as they're only two or three years old, I'm happy with that. Might get half a dozen this year.

 

[summerdays]

Slugs don't seem to touch rocket or fennel in my garden.

 

[Globalti]

My British colleague who lives in Lagos has this growing all over his garden - he didn't plant it, it just appeared. TBH I don't know if he "enjoys" it or not but there's a hell of a lot of it. Maybe the Hausa security guard planted it to help wile away the long mosquito-infested nights.

 

[Fnaar]

Tomatoes, courgettes, beetroot?

You may have to buy the plants rather than starting from seed.

Toms... might give them a bash if I get round to getting a plastic greenhouse thingy. Slug-fiends ate the beetroot and courgette plants already.

 

[Arch]

I know you didn't want remedies, but... I've heard that they don't like garlic (and your experience suggests that's true), so watering with water in which garlic has been steeped/mashed is a suggestion...

When I had the allotment, the one thing that grew like billy-o and didn't seem to mind a bit of neglect, was Swiss Chard (the Bright Lights variety has stems of different colours). It's edible (the young leaves like spinach, the older stems stewed a bit like celery, the older leaves like cabbage) and ornamental (I've seen it in municipal flowerbeds in France) and seemed pretty much indestructable, sowed in situ - I kept an eye on the weeds around it when it was just starting, but after that it seemed to be able to cope. I don't know if I had a lot of slugs there, but the chard worked every year....

Fruit trees sounds good. Get a quince, and then you can make quince jelly. I love quince jelly.... Maybe bushes as well, for a faster crop? Raspberries, currants etc?

 

[Chuffy]

Beans seem relatively snail/slug free once they've got their second leaves up. It's not too late for runners, French beans or drying beans.

 

[Amanda P]

Oh yeah. There are raspberries as well. Dead easy to grow - just buy the canes, bung 'em in and eat the results. I get about half the crop; the blackbirds get the rest.

But that's OK, they grow more than I can eat, and I like blackbirds too. (But not for eating, you understand...)

Blackbirds eat slugs. More blackbirds is good. But not if they're so full of raspberries they lose interest in the slugs. And who'd eat slugs, given the choice?

 

[Black Sheep]

thistles, although you might get inundated with depressed donkeys

 

[accountantpete]

The trouble is that if you get something the slugs don't like them then the butterflies and blackfly etc almost certainly will.

that leaves leeks and onions!

 

[rich p]

Raspberries? Leeks? Pah!

Get a couple of knackered old fridges and a Ford Escort on bricks in there. Ten years and no slug damage at all. I've got some old corrugated asbestos sheeting you can use for ground cover as well. No more weeds and as it breaks down it opens up the structure of the soil.

Uncle, when I was in Belgium recently, I noticed a lot of espaliered fruit trees woven into each other as a feature or a 'fence'. This isn't a tradition you've adopted then with a Cortina rusting into a Corsair, then?