Photo by Rick Gush
I ca n’t distinguish these escargot , but they ’re eat hole into part of my Brassica oleracea italica industrial plant .
The proficient news in the garden is that mybroccoli plantsare all grow like wild . I in the end ascertain distance to get all 100 plants in the ground , and aside from a few stormy day , it ’s been strong and sunny so the plants are really jumping . Some of the largest are 2 feet magniloquent with 2 - column inch - duncical stalks . There are no flowers yet , but it ’ll only be a matter of time . We should for certain have a lot of Brassica oleracea italica to run through this winter .
The bad news is that thebroccoliplants in one of the garden orbit are infest with tinysnails . I have n’t been capable to place these little monsters yet , but they are chew a good deal of holes in the lowly leaves of the plants . Our garden isorganic , so I do n’t apply metaldehyde on the garden escargot . Instead , I use escargot pellets made from atomic number 26 sulphate , and they usually work pretty well .
But this time , the snail pellets do n’t seem to be working . I ’m not too worried , because the affected plants do have a whole lot of upper leaves that are insensible so far . But the holey leaves still devil me . The little snail do n’t seem to be country crawlers like the big type , so I ’m not surprised that the first pellets , which I placed on the soil surface , had small effect . Next , I tried wetting the leafage and then scattering the pellet now onto the foliage . Hmm , not much better .
I have , of grade , tried salt border , Cu border strip and plates of beer , none of which worked peculiarly well . Those strategies are also sort of a pain because I have so many fiddling game . When I lived in the States and had a larger one - game garden , I had great luck when I built a bull borderline around the whole garden . There were spate of snails in the landscape gardening right next to the garden , but I gauge the snails did not love crawling across the pig strips to get into the vegetable dapple .
These Clarence Day , I ’m hired man - pick all the little buggers I can find out , but I ’m apparently missing a spate , as the holey leaves keep getting holy . At this tip , only 20 of my 100 plants are affected , but I ’m hoping that the cold-blooded weather comes soon , as this always seems to be the most good snail deterrent . In the meanwhile , I hypothecate I should jog around to some of the old - fourth dimension veg nurseryman around here to see if any of them can give me utile advice on the subject .
My original concern with the Brassica oleracea italica was that they ’d have problems with cabbage worms . I ’ve spray the plants several time withBacillus thuringensis , but it does n’t seem to be as effective as a contraceptive , and I recollect it only works when there are already worm present on the plants . I cogitate the rainfall lave it off as well , so I ’m prepared to spray again after almost every rain . My trigger finger should get quite a workout this winter .
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