h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some great tips there Nigel

I've also used porridge oats and bran to prevent slug damage. The slugs love it, but it's fatal to them. Porridge, oatmeal and bran, dries out the slug inside and they die. It means that birds, frogs and toads can still eat them I did find that the birds very much liked the porridge oats too and ate more of it than the slugs

Venus .

The porridge oats and bran sound a good idea . I have never tried it myself but have heard about it from my book called '50 ways to kill a slug'. It is an interesting little book and most of the ways are really quite funny and make me .

Another common way people kills them (my nan used to do this), is to put salt onto them . I have never done this ever since I went on a bug course at work, apparently salt creates the most painful death and literally burns the little creatures .

I don't like them but would never see any creature suffer instantly like that. The porridge oats and bran are different because you don't actually see them really suffer like pouring salt onto them where you can literally hear their squeals of pain .

I like the subject animation .

Take care.
Nigel

Hi Nigel

I have that slug book too, the pictures are really funny

One of the major drawbacks of using oats or bran, besides the birds eating it; is that you have to replace it every time it gets wet. This can end up being quite an expensive exercise.
I usually just rely on the frogs and newts to keep the slug population down, though even they can't manage those big ones

Like you i would never use salt to kill slugs, that is a cruel method Aside from that, we both know that too much salt in the soil is bad for plants.

I've been on three bug courses. The first was one great and i really enjoyed it. The last too have been a little dull for me, mainly because nothing new has come to the fore since the fisrt course. I'm not good in a classroom situation and i get distracted very quickly

I know what you mean about being distracted, I was exactly the same .

The crazy thing was where I worked, the courses that were run at our garden centre were few and far between. We had to travel around the country going to other garden centres or nurseries where the course was being held.

I can remember the once traveling to St. Albans to listen to a course our own garden centre manager was giving . Why couldn't he have just repeated it at our own garden centre? Oh, well, it was a paid day trip out and enjoyed having a luxury hired car paid for too .

Venus, do you know 'Scarletts Plant Nursery' in Essex? The garden centre that I worked at had a lot of plants from there and I went down with a few others on a day trip to have a look around the nursery some years ago.

It was a very long drive and really was the wrong time of year to go, we went in January and there wasn't much going on but as it was the quietest time at the garden centre, this is when we did many of the nursery trips. Scarletts staff gave us a talk and showed us around, very interesting but a tiring day.

I am not sure if it is the same but noticed when I went, there were a lot of houses painted different colours, pink being a favourite one .

Take care.

Nigel

Hi Nigel
Nope, never heard of Scarletts, obviously not a nursery we deal with.

The last course i went on last year, we had to travel to Surrey. It was a nightmare to get there and back We had all the works traffic and an accident to get round.
We've never held any courses at our garden centre. We don't have any buildings to do that sort of thing.
Some of the villages here do like to paint their houses different colours. It makes it interesting to drive through these places, to see what colours are in vogue