Moon phase: Week 1 (waxing)
I went up to the allotment on Tuesday morning, not having been for a few days, and discovered that the pests had been very busy in my absence. Worst hit were the "München Bier" radishes, which I was growing for the seed pods (right). So, no trendy stirfries for me! I pulled all the plants out and squished the offenders underfoot before throwing them in the compost bin.
Luckily the radishes were the first to attract the cabbage white butterflies' attention, so the caterpillars on my cabbages and romanesco weren't so big and voracious. On the other hand the autumn brassicas also had whitefly and a few aphids. I removed what I could, then after work Richard and I went round to our local garden centre and picked up some pyrethrum spray and a big micromesh tunnel, and took them to the allotment to escalate the War on Terror. I try to only use sprays as a last resort, and really I should have netted the plants better to prevent this happening - but it's easy to be wise after the fact.
The other major pest on the allotment is slugs. Not just little keel slugs, but honking great Arion ater, those three-inch-long black fellows. I had to eject one from the heart of one of my red cabbages - the chances of us getting any brassicas this autumn are looking increasingly slim :(
Not to be daunted, however, I have deployed a Slug-X trap baited with diluted dregs of raspberry vodka (no beer in the house, and you can't buy alcohol before 8am, even for slug-killing purposes). I put it a good foot or two from the netted cabbages, so that it lures them away rather than to them. I've also put a ring of fine woodshavings around each plant as a slug barrier - a recent trial in "Grow Your Own" found that bran worked very well, but I couldn't find any in my local Tesco and I didn't want to wait for a trip into town. So, I'm trying out their "Value Small Animal Bedding" as an alternative. Fingers crossed!