Snails are vile, except on a plate ...Please HELP!

YUCK!!! How awful! Coriander! That stuff is just soap with roots, and sneakily masquerades as parsley unless one is most vigilant when eating out.

The proper way is to feed the creatures with flavoured flour. It works well also with earthworms, my Dad tells me.

To pursue our apparently shared ambition of large scale digression , I'd like to remind our young readers of a certain C. Darwin whose lifelong passion was earthworms. He published a famous study that declared that an acre of average garden soil contains over 50 000 earth worms (he did specify the exact number but I'm too lazy to nip downstairs to find the book) and played various musical instruments for them. Amongst other things.

180 degrees turn back to the topic, up here in the land of eternal dampness, it's a round of pellets when new growth appears or young plants are planted, and then just hoping for the best. Selecting slug tolerant plants is a must, and any young plants must be robust and tall enough before planting in ground.

 

Glad he qualified his findings by specifying garden soil. He obviously never sank a spade into a French arable field! There wasn't a trace of the tiniest earthworm on our land when we took it on. The ones inhabiting the garden now are the size of small snakes They seem to get on well with, er, the small snakes....

 

Re-reading your question, I realise that I didn’t really answer you. How I am going about tackling it is: I try to follow the excellent advice given to me by Liz the pot, but I discover more and more that greenkeeping is such a vast subject that advice can be just as difficult to follow as when trying and obey the instructions of a master musician on a point of interpretation — I am often reminded of Captain Haddock who, returning from an evening at the Music Hall, tries to change water into wine; when, to his astonishment, he fails, he exclaims: “Il réussit bien à le faire, lui!”

The more I read about it, the more I realise that Poa annua is a pest worse than slugs; I have discovered that it is active all year round and that its flowering cycle is every ten days!

It would seem that a good start is verticutting to weaken them, as well as mowing to chop their heads off as mercilessly as if they were French royalty, while fertilizing the good ones to encourage them to win the war of the grasses.

As you can only fertilize every six weeks or so, regular spraying liquid seaweed is a good complementary treatment but I find it very difficult to do it evenly – perhaps I haven’t got the right nozzle. For the lawn I posted above – over which I have drooled for some years – they put a dye in their spray (not to colour the grass) so that they know to within a centimeter where the fertilizer has been applied.

A point I made earlier regarding the verticality of the blades of that lawn (which makes it look as disciplined a GI’s crew cut) makes me wonder if that is not the characteristic of a particular species of grass (in that sense, I may be fighting a losing battle; my grass looks a lot like a disheveled hooligan).

Ultimately (and I will ask Liz about that in due course), I wonder if I shouldn’t, in the Autumn, use something (?) to annihilate the poa annua altogether and, next Spring, reseed all the bald areas this will have created.

Do you ask because you have a similar problem?

 

Yes, having finally vanquished the couch grass that had taken over 1500m2 of 'lawn', and in the process left that area bare for 2 1/2 years, the Poa has had a field (ha!) day. Luckily, it is more seasonal here and burns off by June, but not before it's seeded copiously. Still, it'll give me something to do for the next few years If Liz comes up with an extremely selective weedkiller that can tell Poa from fescue and ray-grass I'll be first in the queue