Pig Sty Avenue

I sowed in the poly-tunnel about 150 Beta vulgaris seeds, a month or more ago, and they were almost all all eaten by slugs. So I sowed another 150 more recently, (if I'd kept up with the blog a little more, I could be certain about the timings, but there you go), taking more slug-defence measures . Unfortunately, mice (I assume) seem to love the seeds, and dig them out of the seed tray, obviously to the detriment of growing seedlings, which is very unhelpful. So this morning, I pricked out the remaining 24 (exactly) seedling survivors from various seed trays and collated them in one module tray, and elevated that so they're hopefully safe now from slugs AND mice. This is the second time I've tried to grow this plant. First time was a direct sowing and only one plant grew. I saved and subsequently lost the seed I harvested from that. So if I get, say, enough for a couple of rows, (about 20) from this batch, that will be a 2000% improvement on last time, even though it'...

The poly-tunnel has not been an overwhelming success. There's the enormous temperature range for one thing: -1c to 51c during one week last May. And then the slugs have wreaked havoc. For example I have only 5 parsley plants of 100s which germinated, and those 5 are not looking good. I've got 2 lemon balm, ditto. The tomatoes, var. Latah are a joke: I've had 1 single cherry tomato, and it was quite bitter; the tomato situation was not helped by the poly tunnel moving 1ft north during a gale, crushing most of the plants as it went. So I've got some heavy duty tent pegs to keep the frame in place. I've never used slug pellets because the plot is so thickly populated with frogs, which I don't want to be collateral damage. But as they don't climb onto the polytunnel table, I've started sprinkling some there, with good effect. I've also, this morning, sprinkled a defensive line of salt around the pots, trays and modules which are gathered together in th...