[CH] Chile Progress and a request

Assembly (Assembly1@btinternet.com)
Sun, 23 Apr 2000 11:59:49 +0100 

Hi all,

Thanks to all the wisdom on this list, my Anaheims are growing apace here in
the English Midlands and I do have hope for them.  I even potted the runts
sharing the nursery cells rather than discarding them and they are all doing
very well.  So far, life for the Anaheims is going so smoothly that I have
half promised some of the extras to my neighbour - who will probably become
a CH as well.

However, there is a cloud on this idyll.  Last evening I was looking in my
kitchen garden (a large wooden box) to see if there was enough mint grown to
garnish the roast lamb (sorry Doug) and found that all the roots had been
eaten away.  Now, there was an article in an English paper about some pest
which has just come into Britain which ate roots, especially of container
plants.  Stupid me - even though the roots of the chives were also eaten
about a month ago, I thought this was a mammalian creature (perhaps a
squirrel or something) as something had dug a hole next to the chives (about
the size of a fist and in a place with no room for a cat).  

Anyway, I pulled the mint tops away from the ground and there they were:
little grub thingies in the ground.  My old Sunset Garden Book gives the
name of a similar-looking pest called a root weevil and I think that's what
the English paper called them.  Sunset is pretty dim about the cure for
them, stating that the adults can be fought with heavy chemicals on
ornamental plants, but only provides a slight hope of nematodes for the
grubs.

Any answers?  There's no sign of them so far in my garden beds or rosemary
container, so I'm thinking of just binning the contents of the herb
container and starting all over again with brand new compost and new plants.
 Will this work, perhaps?  And lest someone say I'm off-topic, my little
chiles overlook this carnage from their living room window sill.

Just as I went from wooly liberal to vigilante for a few weeks after having
my scooter stolen, I'm willing to abandon my preference for organic
solutions if a chemical one is more likely to succeed.  Within a month or so
I'll begin hardening off my Anaheims and don't want all my hard work to end
up as a "grub steak".

Cheers,

Virginia in old Leicester