IF slugs are still decimating your garden - consider Companion Planting. It’s where you choose specific flowers or herbs to either deter slugs - or encourage them to eat those particular plants instead of your favourites. Aromatic plants like lavender and rosemary have strong scents that actually deter slugs, so it’s worth strategically dotting them around the garden in the hope they keep slugs away.
You can buy a lavender plant from B&Q for as little as £4. They also don’t like hydreangea’s - as well as thick, hard to eat plants like ferns. And they don’t like the bitter taste of Euphorbia’s and hairy geraniums also put them off.
Alternatively they absolutely love marigolds, lupines and larkspur, so it’s an idea to get them in the ground to offer your slimy friends something else - a sort of distraction technique. Some gardeners - and many allotmenteers - will have a strip of marigolds between their lines of veg in the desperate hope it puts off the little leaf munchers. In Veronica's Column this week.
.. FOR the next six weeks from now the heady scent of elderflower will fill the air in countless British gardens.
Now is the perfect time to pick the blossoms - which can be transformed into cordial, added to cakes and champagne or even fried in batter! Belvoir Farms founder Mary Manners has revealed her cordial recipe to Sun Gardening. YOU WILL NEED: 2.5kg white sugar, granulated or caster Zest from 2 unwaxed lemons 20 fresh elderflower heads, stalks trimmed 85g.
