Marigolds!

Marigolds are meant to be great for the garden for two reasons:

1. They attract bees and other useful insects
2. They apparantly help repel some unwated insects due to the scents they give off

Plus, they look really pretty and liven up the plot. We planted 12 or so, and hope that we'll notice a few less annoying pests and a few more bees to help pollinate stuff, and hoverflies and wasps to help kill unwanted pests. Fingers crossed that these organic beacons of hope do us good!

Here's a brief article on biological pest control - something that inspired the planting of non-edible plants in the allotment. We expect to do more reading and get some more pretty things planted in soon!

Slugs: Copper load o this!

Within a few days of sorting out our plot, we noticed something had been chewing away at our plants. Prime suspect: slugs and snails!

The easy option would be to reach for a bottle of slug pellets and pepper the plots with poisonous little nuggets for the buggers to feast on. However, we're trying to do this gardening thing as organically as possible, so that was out the question.




The first plan was to draft in some frogs for the communal pond, which are in transit as we speak (keep posted for more on that). Until then, we did some research and one method that sounded like it probably wouldn't work was creating a barrier of copper tape around the bed, which apparantly slugs/snails won't be too happy crossing due to their slimey bits reacting with the copper. We thought we'd give it a go.



That said, we laid down a barrier of tape around one of the beds to test, after which we plucked out any slugs and snails we could find - probably not a good plan to trap them in with our beloved veg.

Let's hope this works - if not, we've got plenty more organic pest control plans for the plot.