Decimation

Erysimum 'Red Jep' happily resistant to slugs

One thing I've learned this year is not to plant fresh green new plants in midsummer. Recently  I bought three lupins, three alstroemeria and a dahlia. I planted them out, surrounded them with wool slug pellets and within one night they had all been eaten to rags - mostly by brown slugs. I crept out at night with a torch and there would be three or four slugs to each plant. Where do all these slugs come from? I know Monty Don says we should welcome them in the garden and although they don't disgust me at all, I find it hard to welcome creatures so assiduously gobbling up my new plants. 

Sad collection of  slug-decimated plants: one lupin, two alstroemerias and a salvia. 

                      

I know slugs fancy the odd beer (as in beer traps) but finding I had no beer in the flat, I resorted to putting the collected slugs in the the undrunk booze I found in the kitchen, so far the remains of a bottle of cassis  and some port. I thought it would be better for them to die in something alcoholic and sweet than the advised white spirit. 

                                               

Anyway, in the end I dug  all the surviving plants up and repotted them and stood them on garden tables. I will now keep them till the autumn when both plants and slugs will be dormant and by next spring, perhaps the plants will have settled in enough for them not to seem such a delicacy.  

More optimistically,  my gorgeous tall sunflower is way taller than me now.  Looking sleepily out of the window the other day I saw a squirrel run up to the top the sunflower stem and a sparrow furiously attacking the squirrel. Luckily there is nothing interesting to a squirrel at the top of a not-yet-flowering sunflower so it hasn't tried it again. Meanwhile the sunflower's bamboo support was not enough for squirrels and wind  and it was tilting alarmingly so I tied it to  a thin-handled weeding tool stuck into the ground next to it,  which has prevented it from being flattened.