And a bit of reassurance for Peg - I agree entirely (well, almost)! I don't have a problem with very, very, very occasional use of a shortcut. (I'd not heard of the agricultural vinegar idea - it looks like it's the other side of the pond. A quick search on Google for "agricultural vinegar UK" only gave me pickles!)

The one time I used roundup was certainly not lazy. And at the time only stupid in the sense of being daftly over-ambitious, with far too small a time-window to clear some wildly overgrown land.

With hindsight, fair enough - definitely stupid. Come spring digging time, I had a "dead" bed. The soil was cold, sodden, smelly, sour, thick clay - unlike any of my other beds. The only living thing to be seen - the weed roots which had survived. (And that's NOT what the label promised!)

And after the extra work involved in a bitingly cold and wet February and March to recover that bed - roundup will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER appear on my plot again.

Why didn't it behave as my neighbouring plot-holders (who do indeed swear by it) said it would? I neither know nor care - filthy stuff, and useless into the bargain, in my experience.


Another hobbyhorse - slug pellets! At least 95% dog food and yeast extract, and 5% or less poison (and that gets washed out in the rain). A truly brilliant piece of marketing - the pellets kill the slugs (and lots else besides) for a couple of days - you see them, lots of them; then the pellets lie around for weeks, attracting and feeding newly hatched slugs, the new generation, until they're big enough for you to see - oh, and that reminds you to buy another can! Neat.

Ach, I'm talking too much. Just a couple of my hobbyhorses!

All best - Gavin