Permaculture, naked tomatoes, slug sections and a pup

Well I'm back from Sunrise and ready for new gardening challenges after attending a begginers workshop on Permaculture and chilling in the portable gardens on display (above). Permaculture is basically a design system approach to organic gardening with ethics at the core, although it can be applied to all aspects of life. I'll try and write about it a bit more when I've got time, or you could read about it here or here. It may be a while before I can really get into it, although some of it I do already and there's things I can build on.



I returned to find my Tomatoes still alive although further infested by the disease. Thanks to direction from She who digs though, I've managed to identify it as Mosaic Virus and have followed advice on a website that suggests removing all affected leaves and leaving the healthy ones. That meant just about all of them so now my poor plants are looking extremely bare. Apparently though, according to this secret its the best thing I could have done anyway. Lets just hope its not all some internet hoax! Many thanks for the help SWD.



I went out on slug patrol this evening and found this little blighter biting the beer bait. I also found another in a different trap... and one on the eggshells - which proves they don't work. Despite all my new found hippy permacultural intentions, I had a bit of a turn. I was holding a pair of scissors in my hand for cutting bits of loo roll to protect my lettuce. Chopping slugs in half is apparently the most humane way to get rid of them... so I tried it. At first I was horrified as slime pumped out both sides of the little fella's disected body. I actually like slugs when they're not eating my plants. But then I found another one and tried again. It must be a bit like serial killing because it got easier and I desenstised pretty soon. Before you know it I was chopping away like Floyd on a Saturday morning. Oh well... the way I look at it, it'll provide some food for the birdies tomorrow and its not like I'm even a proper veggie anyway. I'll stop once I've installed a pond with toads, honest...

Oh alright, just to make you feel better here's one of my friend Zoe's puppies. Well, not hers exactly but her dog Poppy's. Isn't he/she/it cute?