Chilli flowers and snails

Photo also posted at Lacer’s photos

My chillies are really budding well now, with a few flowers appearing. Judging by the number of buds, I’m going to have a glut of chillies, I do use them quite a lot but not that much! I may have a go at drying them if I do have to many, I tend to use dried chilli far more than fresh.

I still haven’t managed to re-pot my chillies and aubergines, they’re beginning to really need it but I haven’t had time. I also have a new collection of herbs from the Green Fair yesterday, more coriander (a small but already very fast growing plant), flat leaf parsley (much prefer that over my curly leaf parsley), mint, oregano and thyme, all these will need re-potting to.

The chillies and the majority of my herbs, being inside, are escaping the menace that is currently plaguing my little greenhouse, snails. We found two in there yesterday and I was a big girl’s blouse and got Mr. Lacer to evict them, unfortunately today Mr. Lacer was at work today and I found five! So, for the first time in my 33 years I had to pick up a snail and I deposited them on the lawn. Girl Lacer, who witnessed this, was very impressed that “Mummy was being a brave mummy”. A little while later, Girl Lacer, who had earlier said she was only going to touch snails when she was a “brave mummy”, disappeared back out into the garden, she then came back in and said “I moved the snails to the earth (my borders), because they like the earth and there’s food there. I stroked one first and then I picked it up and moved it!”, ahhh bless her and supports my theory that sometimes if you want your kids to do something, you have to do it first yourself, I didn’t particularly want her to be squeamish about snails, like I was am, and now she isn’t!

So my poor greenhouse occupants are suffering from some eaten leaves, I think the local snails think I’ve parked a buffet in the garden for them. I use slug / snail tape on my pots, which does seem to be doing the job (it’s on my salad trough, carrots and french beans, which are all out of my greenhouse and don’t seem to have a problem with snails). It’s also on my pots in the greenhouse but the greenhouse is quite crowded now (and will be even more so when I re-pot, groan) and I think the snails are climbing up inside the greenhouse plastic and then ‘leaping’ over the rims of the pots. Girl Lacer had a rather smart idea when I was talking about it with her, at the moment the slug tape is around the pots, Girl Lacer suggested putting the slug tape on the rim so they couldn’t climb over, genius (spot of motherly pride there, she’s only 4). So I’ll do that, although we’ll still have a problem of them getting on by leaves brushing the plastic.