Do beer traps work?

Yes and no. I have a huge problem with slugs and snails in my garden and last night I resorted to beer traps to help me deal with them. What you do is get some beer (the cheapest you have easy access to, slugs and snails aren't fussy) and put it in a jar or other similar container in the garden near where you're having a particular problem. I've made a little hollow in the soil and leaned mine at an angle on it to give the traps some protection from rain and to make it easier for the slugs and snails to get in. This proved a successful approach. I came out this morning to a large number of dead slugs and a smaller number of dead snails, despite snails being the more visible problem in my garden. I'd estimate I got about a dozen across my two containers. So, to that extent the answer is yes, beer traps are successful. The traps stopped some slugs and snails from getting to nearby plants last night. I can't see any more damage than I could yesterday. But the answer is also no, because they didn't prevent slug damage in the rest of my garden and they will only prevent damage for as long as the traps continue working with their existing beer or I refill them. And the original beer doesn't work for long, even if you sieve out the slugs and snails like I did to stop them quickly reeking of rotting slug.

So why did I choose to use them and am I glad I did?

I have two or three particular problems that I wanted to solve with them. The first is that this year slugs and snails have completely stripped a large number of my climbing beans of leaves and largely stripped even more, even though I waited until the beans had grown quite big and therefore the leaves were tougher and less enticing before I planted them out. This has happened despite my best attempts to kill any slugs or snails I catch in the area.

The second problem is that slugs or snails are now eating my lettuce, despite me putting it in slug rings. Slug rings do help, but they're not infallible and I suspect mine could do with a bit of a clean. Also anything that touches or overhangs them can provide a bridge in for enterprising slugs and snails, and the onions keep doing that here. And in addition to that, once slugs learn they can climb over them for a worthwhile meal, they tend to keep doing it.

Thirdly, they've eaten an awful lot of the leaves of my squashes and although I've grown more squashes from seed in pots, I'm worried the same thing will happen again as soon as I put them in the soil, especially if they overhang the slug ring.

I put beer traps out to deal with two of these three situations. The nearby slugs and snails were attracted to the beer, climbed in to drink it and drowned - I'm not sure why they do drown, as at the angle mine were, they could theoretically easily have climbed out again. Nevertheless, they did. So instead of eating my plants, the slugs and snails died drinking my beer - or more accurately my husband's beer, as I accidentally picked up the wrong bottle from the fridge. However, you can find hundreds of slugs and snails in a garden even as small as mine. So more will come.

If you have a significant problem with them like I do, just using a beer trap or two won't diminish your overall numbers much unless you have ready access to a large amount of very cheap beer (e.g. home brew gone wrong) and you keep refilling them regularly because they only work for a day or two on the original beer.

After having established that the beer traps weren't cutting it, I went back to doing slug patrols. What you do is wear gardening or washing-up gloves and fill a large pot with water and a very large squirt of washing-up liquid - probably about 2 or 3 times the amount you'd use to wash up. Then, when it's getting dark and especially if it's just rained, you go round the garden and pick up every slug and snail you can find and pop them in the water in the pot. Without the washing-up liquid they would just climb out again, but with the washing-up liquid they drown. About 9 or 9.15 pm is a good time of day to do this in London in June, as the slugs and snails have started venturing out, but it's still light enough to see them. I have now done this several days in a row and have finally largely halted the damage to my beans. It took about 3 days before the number I found started to decrease. I've not yet got so far that I don't find any. I think I must have killed a couple of hundred this way now.

How to grow squashes and pumpkins in the UK

Squashes and pumpkins are great plants to grow. You either end up with a decorative pumpkin or a delicious squash (squash is the name that tends to be given to pumpkins you eat), or if you've picked a really good variety, both. However, they have some very specific needs and problems. I'm just going to use the word "squash" in this post, but everything I say applies equally to pumpkins.

Sowing the seeds

In an ideal world, you should sow your squash seeds indoors in April. This gives them an opportunity to grow to a decent size before you harden them off and plant them out. However, they need a lot of light, so make sure they're on a sunny window sill or very near to the window. I usually start mine off on the dining room table. However, this year I was growing an exceptionally large number of plants from seed, and my squash seeds that were at the far end of my plants couldn't cope with the slightly lower level of light and died. So definitely give the seedlings plenty of light. I recommend planting at least 3 times as many seeds as you think you're going to need, unless you know your garden is less dangerous to squash plants than mine (for instance your garden is a balcony – if it is, you will need a truly huge container and canes or a trellis to grow them up, squashes need a lot of space and soil to grow in).

Hardening off and planting out

Once there's no more danger of frost in your area, you can harden them off and plant them out. If you're in London or Cornwall, this will be quite a lot earlier than in other parts of the UK. However, there are problems with planting them out at the earliest possible moment that I've discovered over the years:

1. slugs and snails almost always seem to devour most of the first plants I put out (it's possible this will also be a problem later, but it's also possible that bigger, tougher leaves will deter slugs and snails);
2. if the weather gets a bit cold, your squash will more or less stop growing.

There are, however, also problems with planting them out late:

1. they outgrow their pot;
2. their stem becomes very long, but fragile, meaning it's all too easy to kill the plant by snapping it when finally planting it out;
3. I don't want to have the dining room table covered in plants for any longer than I have to;
4. I don't like leaving my veg beds empty until June, but in an ideal world I wouldn't grow any other sort of veg there first unless it was in the same crop rotation group as my squashes and there are no other suitable veg to put there in my crop rotation scheme.

This means that almost every year, I plant the squashes I've planted indoors out, only to have most of them die either from their stem breaking or from being eaten by snails.

I half solved this problem and half made it worse this year, by allowing self-seeded foxgloves to grow in my squash bed.

It was very pretty and meant I was in less of a rush to plant the squashes. Unfortunately, as there was enough room to plant the squashes and leave the foxgloves, this is what I did. While the weather was dry, the slugs and snails my foxgloves were harbouring only crawled out and devoured one squash plant. Once it started bucketing it down in June, they ventured further afield and stripped almost all the leaves off another two. To get around this, I've now removed the foxgloves and killed all the snails and slugs I found in the process. 

This isn't foolproof. I still have slug rings around the plants. But having the slug rings wasn't foolproof either. Hopefully the combination of these two will work (I choose not to use slug pellets for environmental reasons).

And now we come to the refinements that I will hopefully remember to make next year. With the replacement plants that I started growing the minute I planted my first squashes out, I ended up putting one in the greenhouse and leaving two outdoors. The one in the greenhouse was a little way ahead of the others, but not a huge amount when I put it in there. The difference is now far more obvious:

Maxima squash growing in the greenhouse

Maxima squashes growing outdoors

I am planning to wait until the leaves get bigger and tougher so they are less attractive to slugs and snails before I plant them. Next year, I also plan to leave all my squashes in the greenhouse until at least early June, but potted up into much larger pots than I started them off in.

Also, in order to stop me fretting about empty beds, I've decided to sow annuals that will flower in May in them. This is going to mean sowing the seeds in the autumn. Here's a list of suitable annuals.

Now back to other standard advice for squash:

Feeding

Squash are very hungry plants. Make sure you give them plenty of compost. I'm a big fan of composted horse manure, but for lockdown reasons this year I'm using my own home-made compost. You can just stick this on top of the soil like a mulch instead of digging it in. It will gradually make its way into the soil anyway and will do a perfectly good job of feeding your plants. You can also use chicken manure pellets. I'm not sure if you could get away with just watering with fertiliser. If this is your only option it might be worth a try.

Watering

Squash are also very thirsty plants. Make sure you water them a lot and very regularly. I water mine pretty much every day it doesn't rain. Never water the leaves if you can help it. Squash are very prone to getting powdery mildew and water on the leaves makes them more vulnerable.

Avoiding powdery mildew

Unless you're very lucky, by the end of the summer your squash leaves will be covered in powdery mildew. There are a few things you can do keep it at bay for as long as possible, but avoiding it entirely has been beyond me so far. The tips are:

1. Avoid getting water on the leaves when watering.
2. Check regularly for powdery white spots appearing on either side of the leaves and remove the affected leaves (don't completely strip the plant of leaves, it probably won't survive this, but will survive powdery mildew).
3. Make sure the plants have enough food (compost/fertiliser) and water. A well fed, well watered plant is less susceptible to fungus.
4. Don't grow any other plants prone to powdery mildew nearby (I'm thinking sweet peas here).
5. Support the squash plants on canes or sweet corn (see below).
6. Spray both sides of all the leaves with neem oil diluted with water or milk diluted with water every time it has rained (I tried doing this, but I just can't. The plants get huge, it takes ages and then it only goes and rains again).

Don't worry too much about the plants getting powdery mildew. Mine still produce lovely, edible squashes anyway.

Supporting the plant

Squashes have a natural tendency to climb - some more than others. If you grow sweet corn within their reach, a lot of squashes will use their tendrils to climb up it. This keeps them off the ground and seems to lower their risk of powdery mildew. You can also insert bamboo canes in the ground around the squashes, either just upright or in groups tied together at the top. Some varieties of squash will naturally grab these with their tendrils, some need tying on. If your squash plant grows really big fruit, then you may need to either provide it with much sturdier support than bamboo canes or simply let it rest on the ground. I cannot guarantee that every type of squash will take well to being treated as a climbing plant, but the ones that like it really like it. I can say for certain that winter squash Sweet Dumpling is happier climbing up something than sprawling across the ground. This year I'm growing Maxima squashes and I'm not yet sure how it will go with them (or indeed if I have enough bamboo canes left to try this).

Harvesting and curing

Summer squashes can be harvested throughout the summer. Winter squashes are typically harvested in autumn, especially in October. A lot undergo a colour change that shows they are ripe. Ideally, you should wait for this colour change before harvesting them. Other signs they are mature is a tough skin and a hollow sound when tapped. However, irrespective of whether they have achieved this, squashes need harvesting before the frosts come. In my experience with winter squash Sweet Dumpling, some will not change colour before you need to harvest them, but may then change colour much later after harvesting.

To harvest them, cut the stalk with secateurs, leaving as much stalk as possible attached to the squash. Do not lift them by stalk, as you're likely to damage the fruit

Once you've removed the squash, let them cure outdoors in the sunlight for about seven to ten days. If frost is expected, cover them with cardboard or straw at night. Alternatively you can instead leave them to cure in a greenhouse, polytunnel or cold frame. They will become well-ripened here. If you accidentally slightly damage the skin, don't worry: any wounds will heal. But do make sure the fruits don't touch each other.

Storage

Ideally, winter squashes should be stored in a well-ventilated position at between 10 and 15°C. In practice, I don't have any such storage facility. Under the stairs is probably the nearest I have to this, but they're difficult to access and check for signs of rot there. Actually I have successfully stored a lot of squash (particularly winter squash Sweet Dumpling) in the dining room at room temperature. I've also had some disasters though, as when they rot they turn to putrid, staining mush surprisingly quickly. For this reason I now store them on plastic Ikea trays that I can wipe clean if they rot instead of letting them stain the dining room table. Do watch for signs of rot, and remove any affected fruit immediately

Some varieties can happily be stored for up to six months. You'll find out by watching for rot! If you look like you've picked a variety that won't store well in your conditions, you can always roast it and then freeze the roasted flesh. I find this freezes well.

A new veg bed, different rules for growing tomatoes in London and a possible archaeological find

There's not a lot of my garden left that isn't already devoted to growing veg. There's the circle of grass in the middle where we put up the washing line, the concrete path and the grass paths to the shed and the water butts. None of them could go. We need all of them. But what was dispensable was the grass path between the concrete patio at the back of our house and the circle of lawn for the washing line. 

It is with some sadness that I have dug it up, as it was a useful thoroughfare in the garden, made watering easier, gave a greater sense of space and was appealing to look at. Well, I say I dug it up, my husband dug it up for me and it was hell to do. I know, as I had already tried.

It was as dry as dust and packed hard together. We had to water it several times to make it possible to get into it at all. In normal circumstances, I wouldn't have dug it up. But these aren't normal times. The coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown have meant rules in shops about how many items you can buy at once and the dry spring means farms may not be able to produce as much food usual, so it makes sense to grow as much food as possible. And in particular, the vegetable I use the most of is tomatoes, so it makes sense to expand my tomato bed.

I hope that this change is not permanent and that I will be able to return this area of grass in 2021 or 2022. I don 't think I will dare do it at the end of the tomato season this year. Instead, I will want to wait and see how this pandemic and the food supply are panning out. I only hope that after so little rain and with no spare compost, the soil is adequate for growing tomatoes in this year.

I have also made a decision about how to grow tomatoes in London. On Gardener's World Monty Don always tells us not to put our tomatoes outdoors until the end of June. But I think he is basing this on the temperatures in the rest of the UK, not London temperatures. One thing that convinces me of this is my tomatoes that have self-seeded in this year's root vegetable bed.

They are much bigger, healthier and more vigorous (and less leggy) than the tomatoes I grew indoors. One even has flowers on it already. So, from now on I am going to carry on sowing tomatoes indoors, but I am also going to sow seeds outdoors in April where I want them to grow (or possibly even earlier, as they appear not to grow until they are ready, however long they've been in the soil). I will continue to grow tomatoes indoors as a back up, but I will plant these out in mid or late May unless it's an unusually cold or wet year or frost is forecast. I get self-seeded tomatoes in my garden most years, so they are clearly perfectly capable of surviving here.

This year, I don't have enough tomato plants to fill my new bed, as I am rejecting one as too straggly and weak, so I intend to plant one of these self-seeded tomatoes in the new bed. This isn't technically a good idea for crop rotation reasons, but given that I have no known tomato disease anywhere in my garden and that I am hoping to turn this bed back into lawn before tomatoes reach that bed again in my rotation, I think it should be OK.

Finally, whilst he was digging up the new bed, my husband turned up a small pile of large stones, a piece of rusty pipe and what looks like a flint spearhead or similar tool.

It has been shaped to a sharp edge all around it through the rock being chipped away. I don't know if this is a genuine archaeological find or whether a modern person decided to create it using ancient techniques, but either way it's an interesting thing to have found in the garden.

Painting a watercolour of a foxglove in the garden

I wanted to send my uncle a get-well-soon card, so I decided to make my own in watercolour. And what better subject than the foxgloves at the end of the garden and the bees that swarm around them? Actually, it turns out that foxgloves are quite hard to paint close up. I know that now, but I've made the card already. 

First of all I took some photos of my foxgloves and also as many photos of bees as possible, as they move too fast to be able to paint them well from life.

Then I made a pencil sketch of the foxglove with some of the bees, having marked out the size of the card on my bigger piece of paper for sketching.

I then transferred a really light version of the sketch onto my watercolour paper by putting my watercolour paper over the sketch on the inside of a window facing the sun (my own cheaper version of a light box) and marking the key lines in lightly with a pencil.

Next, I masking-taped my watercolour paper to a piece of card and put a faint, intentionally patchy sky-blue wash around the background, using plenty of water. I wanted it to be reminiscent of the sky, even though that wasn't the foxglove's actual background. The reason I chose this background was because I didn't want it to distract from the foxglove.

I then mixed a colour for the foxglove flowers and started filling it into my lightly sketched pattern. It was so sunny out that the colour kept drying out and I had to make more. Every time I ended up making a slightly different colour, but this ended up working to my advantage. 

I'd run out of masking fluid, so I had to make sure that I left areas I wanted to stay white unpainted without any help from masking fluid.

After I had all the lighter background colours in, I filled in the darker colours, including the bees. There's a real difference between the bee in the air, which I sketched and painted based on one of the photos I'd taken earlier, and the bees on the foxglove, which I sketched while they were there and painted from memory. In retrospect, I should have done all the bees from photographs. I also notice from looking at the photographs that I should have added some stronger green parts to the stem.

When it was finished, I took the masking tape off and folded the card back up. I'd already folded the paper before I even started. In retrospect, I should have scored along the fold using a ruler and scissors, as the paper was so thick that it creased all the way along the fold.

Nevertheless, overall I was happy with it as a card and I hope it cheers my uncle up.

Compost successfully made in compost bin despite half-hearted effort

A lot of work is supposed to go into making good compost:

• chop what you put in it small (I sort of did this, I chopped some things and put others straight in because I couldn't be bothered)
• regularly turn it (I largely skipped this part)
• water it if it gets to dry (I almost entirely skipped this part)
• make sure you include a balanced mix of browns (tougher, drier stuff) and greens (softer, moister stuff) (I was pretty OK at this)
• not include anything so tough and woody it's never going to break down, especially not if not chopped small (I was bad at this, I often add things to my compost heap that are very tough and not chopped. Sometimes I take them out entirely later and sometimes I just send them back round if they reach the bottom without composting)
• not include anything that will attract rats, such as fat or meat (I was excellent at this)
• not include weeds or seed heads (I was poor at this, but I did exclude seed heads, tap roots and weeds I know to be problem weeds in compost - my failure is probably best exemplified by the fact my compost heap currently has poppies growing out of it)
• not include any diseased vegetable matter (I was pretty good at this, some things that shouldn't have got in there probably did, but I made an effort to avoid doing this, I really don't want to spread disease in my garden)

Considering how badly I followed the rules, I turn out to have made excellent looking compost. When I removed the front slats from my home-made compost heap (instructions on how to make it are available here), there was a lot of well-composted compost at the bottom. I can't help thinking that given my failure to apply the proper rules of composting in full, that the design of the compost bin must have aided me. It certainly made it much easier to get the compost out than those plastic bins you can buy with just a small door at the front.

I was able to scoop most of the compost out with a fork and spade before the compost above it fell down and took its place. I didn't manage to get right to the back before that happened, but I think I got most of the way there. I think I got about 4 or 5 large tubs full, which I've spread over my squash, tomato and brassica beds, plus a little bit around my sweet corn. I'm pleased to say that there was enough of it that I'm now no longer worried about not buying composted horse manure this year.

I was a little surprised to find that there weren't any worms in my compost, only woodlice. Given how full of worms my garden is, I can only assume that this was because I haven't been keeping it watered and they may well have been in there over winter with all that wet weather, but left when the compost dried out.

After I'd taken all the thoroughly composted compost out, I gave the top part a mix and encouraged it to settle down into the empty part of the compost bin. The compost heap is now much lower, with plenty of room to add more organic matter. Previously compost was heaped above the top of the bin.

Now I've spread my compost I've planted my squashes out. I have my fingers crossed they're not all consumed by slugs and snails as has happened to me in years gone by. I'm not sure if I've still got time to propagate new ones from seed.

Providing they don't meet death by snail, they should pretty quickly fill this bed, then make a bid for more space by crawling across the lawn - unless they don't get enough light; this is the shady side of my garden.
I've also put up the bamboo canes and planted out my remaining beans. There aren't enough of them to fill the canes, so I'm hoping some more of my beans successfully grow. It's not looking good so far, but we'll have to wait and see.

Flowers in the vegetable garden

It's that happy time of year when a lot of my vegetable garden is in bloom. From a distance you can barely see that I have any flowers in bloom at all.

But if you walk round the garden you'll see my bright yellow iris...

...and also climbing roses at either end of the garden...

An aberrant pale pink rose on my white iceberg rose

...and foxgloves...

...and even some of my herbs, fruit and veg are flowering:

Chives in flower

Thyme in flower

Broad bean flowers

Strawberry flowers

Rocket flowers

The bees are loving it and are buzzing everywhere. It's turned beautifully warm outside with more warm weather forecast and so I've taken the decision to plant out my runner beans and French beans on the assumption that London will remain frost free:

It's still a bit tatty in this bed because I'm still growing the kale there for seeds. Because of this, some of my French beans are still sitting in pots while I cross my fingers that I'll get kale seeds soon so I can use the space for more beans. I've also already planted out my sweetcorn. When you put them in, it always seems hard to believe that they'll need the 40 cm spacing the packet requires, but they should start growing pretty quickly.

I've also brought several of my plants that were indoors out to the greenhouse. There's a mixture of plants that will live permanently in the greenhouse and squashes that will go outdoors after I've hardened them off.

I still also have plants indoors, as I repotted some of them. Quite a lot of plants were still several plants to the pot because I had a pot shortage. Planting a lot of my beans out meant that new pots became available.
I also had an interesting experience where several of my maxima squashes died and I thought they were just difficult to grow. What I didn't notice until I moved all the pots was that several of these were in fact growing successfully nearer to the window. It turned out that only the end of the dining room table really near the window is suitable for propagation. If I try to grow plants even a little further in it doesn't work.