Garden update and slug damage
So, since it's been raining for a while and I haven't been able to get to the garden to pick off slugs at first, when I finally did get to it, I had found some damage! My genious plan to plant beans directly into the strawberry patch seemed foolproof. However, it seems that slugs had also been, in the strawberry patch, waiting for strawberries and multiplying, and their favourite food, is beans. So some of my beans ended up looking like this:
If a baby plant gets all of her first leaves eaten off like this, she can't survive, so that kills it completely. This isn't the first time this happened to me, so I was ready for it – I saved some of the seeds of every bean, just in case something happened, and I can re-sow them after the rain has passed. Here is the culprit on the third picture!
A neighbour gardener had told me that these brown slugs are not native to the area, and that they've in fact been imported from america. She added that it had been done on purpose, to destabilize our crops, in a conspiratorial voice. She has been very outspoken anti-american activist, and in fact so focused on blaming americans for everything, that I worry she's missed a very real problem on the balkan: the slavic people. So I don't know how much I trust her story. But, I can see that these slugs outnumber the white slugs by 50:1, and that they eat everything, I've seen them eating even nettle. They'll go and take bites out of tomatoes, they're not shy of getting poisoned. I wonder if anyone knows the accurate lore of this slug?
(I looked it up, the slugs got imported accidentally, with vegetable imports from Portugal and Spain in 1950s, it's called the 'spanish slug' and it spread over all Europe)
Anyway, not all beans have been ruined! In some areas with less strawberries, they've been growing just fine:
And I'm picking slugs off every evening, and relocating them to the wilderness. Hopefully nothing else will get badly damaged!
The rain has made a difference in tomatoes; the first picture shows a tomato I've planted out weeks ago, it already got used to the cold and the wet, it already figured out how to draw nutrients from the soil and it's growing quite nicely! The other tomato, the purple one, has been only recently planted, and immediately turned purple because of the rain. I got it used to the cold, but then it got colder, and it couldn't draw nutrients in colder weather, that's why it's purple, it's a nitrogen deficiency and cold protest. It's going to recover with sufficient sun and fertilization, I had a few like this and they all recovered just fine. Even 2 days of sunshine would fix this!
The rest of the garden is doing fine! Here's some pictures:
