214 PRACTICAL GARDENING. 



"With respect to the gardener's enemies out of doors, and 

 their name is legion, we have very different customers to deal 

 with, and much greater difficulties to contend with. So far 

 as ants and wood-lice are concerned, the same means in all 

 respects must he resorted to ; hut instead of a stray snaO. or 

 sing, we have them in large quantities. There is no such 

 thing as traciag a solitary marauder hy its shining train — if 

 they plague us at all, they do it wholesale ; and if we do not 

 protect our young peas and salads hy some means, they are 

 occasionally lost altogether. A liheral use of lime is of great 

 service, as a preventive of mischief to the j)lace actually 

 guarded ; hut we ought to aim at once at their destruction. 

 The hest traps for slugs and snails are tiles, with the hollow 

 part downwards, and cahbage leaves ; examine these every 

 morning, and the under sides will give us plenty to kill. 

 These should he laid down again directly, and the next morn- 

 ing be examined again. In a garden neglected two years, 

 where weeds had been left to grow, and all living creatures 

 held undisturbed possession through two whole seasons of 

 growth, we once had to contend with two ripe harvests of 

 weed-seeds, and all the slugs and snails that had congregated 

 and multiphed during the whole time. 'We burned all the 

 weeds, and buried all the surface soil, roots, snails, slugs, hots, 

 earwigs, and other Hving pests, two feet deep, and fancied we 

 had at least got rid of all but a few stragglers ; but no sooner 

 did a green leaf appear than it was fairly riddled or gone. 

 We resorted to cabbage leaves, which we procured in the 

 neighbourhood, and laid them thickly about the ground. The 

 first morning the undersides were covered with hundreds of 

 slugs, scarcely thicker than a small straw, besides a few goodly 

 parents : day after day, the numbers seemed scarcely lessened ; 

 and when the leaves became too much withered for use, we 

 procured fresh ones. It would be incredible to speak of the 

 numbers destroyed on half an acre of ground between four 

 brick walls ; and although the cabbage leaves were evidently 

 the tempting food, and we had destroyed tens of thousands 

 by our daily crusade, not a crop could we raise without an 

 embankment of lime, and constantly picking off those that 

 seemed. to come up through the ground between the two rows 

 of lime — for cross them they could not, this was a certainty. 

 Perseverance, however, at length reduced the number so 

 much^ that we seemed to have no more than the usual share; 



