Beans!

So it appears that my bean plants are faring much better this season instead of being completely devoured by slugs. I've been fighting the slugs with as many methods as I can and so far (knock on wood!) I'm winning! The beer traps were working ok, but they were still multiplying too fast and some seemed to be avoiding the traps. Since I was not willing to lose another crop of beans to them I decided to use a non-organic method and sprinkled some Snail and Slug Death powder over the bed to try to control them. But of course even that didn't work...So I turned to copper finally.

I knew that copper tape around the frame of raised beds is a great way to protect the contents of your bed from both snails and slugs, but since I don't have raised beds it never really seemed like an option. Then at the Edible Schoolyard (ESY) Plant Sale I noticed that they use copper collars on some of their plants so I decided to give it a try. Brendan found some inexpensive copper tape (the adhesive side is used to stick the copper to raised beds) at a home improvement store and I created collars for each of my groupings of bean seedlings. So far they are working well, although I’m interested in getting some copper sheets to make more secure collars that can be used from year to year. The sheeting can also be buried slightly in the ground since the key is creating a solid barrier to prevent the slugs from reaching the plants. Since the tape is much more flimsy and only about an inch wide it’s not something that can be buried or easy reused unfortunately, but was a cheap way to experiment with this prevention method.


From the mixed bush bean seeds I started (half the package) only five seedlings actually sprouted. Of those five, one was completely devoured by slugs and another turned out to be a pole bean. The pole beans I purchased from the ESY Plant Sale are also doing well, so I’ve got three bush bean plants and about 11 pole bean plants. The bush beans are still pretty small, but they have already started to flower and put on bean pods. The largest of the pods are lovely light green purple spotted pods, some almost as tall as the plants themselves!