Cannibal Slugs And Marauding Trees

With all the rain we have had of late the garden has gone bezerk but it has also brought with it a miniature plague of slugs that threaten the veggie patch on a nightly basis. To counter the slime oozing hordes we have taken to doing nightly rounds of the garden with tin cans to collect them. Bettina with her yellow rubber glove of death and I, her trusty slug-spotting sidekick, make for a formidable team.

Plucked from their slithering meandering they are ruthlessly flung into the awaiting tin can and are then treated to a hot water bath, with the temperature hovering around boiling point. Strange creatures actually as the boiling water literally dissolves their outer skins instantaneously into a veritable slime broth. We place their remains in a pile, down beside the compost heap, where it has been surprising to note that every evening we find quite a few dining on the corpses of their mates. That right folks, these little suckers are cannibals. Kind of justifies the nightly mass annihilation routine to my mind.

We harvested our small crop of poppies the other day for the seed which Thomas uses in his sour dough bread making. The tomatoes and green runner beans are truly bounteous and my imported butternut pumpkins are doing just fine although the season here may be to short to allow them to bear any decent size fruit. The mulberry tree has gone absolutely ballistic and as a result we go out every evening and collect them from the drop sheets spread around beneath. So far we have stuffed every bit of space in the three freezers downstairs to capacity. We are going to defrost the lot and crush them for wine the weekend after next as the tree seems to be just about finished much to everyone’s relief. Messy little suckers. Generally you can use the green mulberries crushed between your hands to remove the purple stains of the ripe ones. Now that the season is just about over there are very few green ones left which only leaves one acceptable method, being a solution of citric acid and water, to clean your hands with.

Work on the house renovations continues but at present we are concentrating more on the exterior whilst the weather permits. We have put a new roof on the old Germanic style garden shed (circa 1928), replacing the roof tresses and recovering with tar paper and bitumen sealants; the traditional method here. The house having been built in 1928, has seen better days in regard the integrity of the mortar between the bricks.

The walls of the cellar have slowly started to ooze moisture over the past winter so we are courageously digging a trench six feet deep all the way around the exterior walls to expose the outside of the cellar. Next step is to remove the old crumbling mortar, replace it with fresh mortar and seal it in with a modern water repellent skin. Quite a big job but it is being done piece meal without raising too many blisters and bad backs. The toughest part is getting through some of the monster tree roots that have made their way from the surrounding trees to the cellar wall. I think a lot of these are largely responsible for the seepage problems we have begun to encounter.