Slugs, Coffee and Electric Kettles

[jacey]

I read on the wonderful internet that slugs don't like coffee grounds so I've been religiously saving my coffee grounds so I can sprinkle them on the front garden - which is slug paradise due to the previous house owner thinking crazy paving was a neat idea. I figure at best it will sent the slugs screaming into someone else's garden and at worst add a fine layer of coffee-compost to the weed infested border.

But you can't sprinkle the damn stuff until it is dry and I haven't quite got the 'how to dry out used coffee grounds' thing yet. The first container was too tall and narrow. The second was doing fine until we had an influx of visitors who went through two bags of beans in a day and I ran out of container-room.

And, of course, it's been so wet that I haven't been able to bring myself to go outside sprinkling coffee grounds in the rain. Maybe that's just as well... after all the fact that coffee grounds deter slugs is only a theory.... Perhaps I'll go back to putting them in the compost - the coffee grounds I mean, I think the slugs get themselves into the compost and anywhere else they fancy.

But while I'm thinking about beverages... our kettle is on the blink. I'm disappointed as I don't think we've had it for a year yet, but I'm not surprised. Best Beloved must switch it on twenty or thirty times a day for cups of tea - and not always with a carefully measured amount of water in it either. So in the interests of saving the world (and our electricity bill) 1 kwh at a time, I've just ordered a "Tefal Quick Cup" which boils one cupful of water from cold in three seconds.

According to the specs it doesn't quite get the water up to boiling point so I'm not sure that best beloved will take to it for tea-making (he is from Yorkshire, after all and even has a habit of switching the kettle on a second time if he's left it to go off the boil for a few seconds), but friends in the USA have one of those built-in hot water on demand thingies and he reckons it's not so bad for teamaking. I'll let you know.

While we're testing it out I'll try to recall where i bought the old kettle. I'm sure it's still under guarantee. It was either Sainsburys or Asda.

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Putting out beer in the lids of jars is supposed to keep slugs away, I suppose because they're attracted to it and it kills them, or something like that.

[julesjones]

The best thing I ever found was cocoa shell mulch. It even made them think hard about how badly they wanted the lettuce seedlings, which is impressive. The main drawback is that it smells strongly of chocolate, and apparently squirrels find this just as enticing as we do. I kept finding the local squirrel population *frolicking* in the mulch.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

A jar lid full of dead slugs is a truly icky sight to behold, especially if you're slugphobic! I have tried it.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of cocoa shell mulch. is that something you get from any garden centre?

[julesjones]

You should be able to find it in any garden centre, though it may be a seasonal item. It generally comes in 80l plastic sacks, in the same area as the compost and other mulches.

[charlieallery.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's interesting. I'm planning on starting a vegetable garden soon. My brother is going to help me put in a couple of raised beds and I've been thinking along the 'crushed eggshell' line. I don't really dig my garden but there are loads of slugs around when it's raining - and I get them almost nightly in the kitchen (though of a different type), so I know they're plentiful round here.

[julesjones]

It could get expensive for a large garden, but it's very effective for keeping a few beds protected. And it's a good organic matter mulch anyway.

Once it's wettened, a fungus grows through it, which looks unsightly for a couple of weeks, but binds the shell together into a mat. That means you don't need a massively thick layer, unless the squirrels decide to fling it around.

It's pretty good stuff. I was using it in my garden in England, and was most put out when I couldn't find it for the first few years after moving to California. I managed to find it a couple of years ago, and it went a long way to solving my slug problem there. (Must remind brooks_moses about it, in fact.)