Garden Journal - Snails and Roses

It's been far too long since I did a garden update !

We've had what has felt like an interminably long, cold spring. We didn't get the normal warm fortnight in late February, and although we haven't had much rain the temperatures have been a good five degrees or more cooler than usual.

Finally, in the last couple of days we've got weather warm enough for short sleeve shirts. But despite this, we've still planted what needed to be planted. It's been a case of rushing out into the cold and grey weather, doing it, and then getting back indoors to the warmth rather than stopping to take photos !

The warm weather was preceded by a couple of nights of serious rain. That caused all the slugs and snails to come out of wherever they were hiding. Our chard patch was hit hard !

Here they are, promenading around the rim of the raised bed that used top have a whole bunch of healthy chard plants in that had survived the winter and were just starting to do well. The snail in the lead appears to be acting as a cavalry mount for a slug-dragoon and some kind of beetle.

Meanwhile, a patch of roots and debris turned into snail central. That's fine. In the right place, they do a good job of clearing away debris and dead leaves, leaving behind nice fertilising snail poo.

There are at least nine snails in the photo below; can you spot them all ?

Despite my annoyance when they eat our crops, I try to avoid harming snails. They have a role to play in the ecosystem, after all. Even if only as food for the frogs and blackbirds.

So if I catch them moving in to attack our crops, I tap them a couple of times on the shell to get them to pull in, then pick them off. The shell-tapping is because if you just pull them off, the suction effect can cause them terrible internal injuries, but tapping them so they pull into their shell reduces the chances of that. Once I've pulled them off, I put them at the far end of the garden. That way, they'll never make it back to the things I want to protect before dawn.

Also, did you notice how beautiful their shells are ?

But on prettier topics, I pruned the roses quite hard in January. They've rewarded us with a later than usual display of really nice blooms.

This pink rose bush is in the front garden. It's interesting because somehow it has also grown some wild rose stems, so by midsummer we should have a single bush with an amazing mix of big pink roses and small white wild ones.

The red rose in the back garden has made an amazing display of huge red flowers. I was worried for a while because it looked like the aphids were going to get them, but luckily the local tribe of sparrows came along and sorted that out for us.

Finally, the valerian we planted last year has come back really strongly. I didn't think it would; it died right back to ground level over the winter. But now it's made not just a healthy amount of leaves, it's got lots of flowering heads.

Hopefully we'll be able to get some seeds from it and grow some more plants. It is apparently a wonderful herbal cure for headaches and plenty of other things, but a lot of the goodness is in the roots, which means you have to dig it up and kill the plant to use it.