I wrote in my post yesterday, Slug hunting with ammonia, that I had sprayed some of the plants and whatever slugs I found in the greenhouse yesterday morning with slugs. I did in fact do that and it wasn’t until Stefan came home in the evening and went to check on everything in the greenhouse that I realized what a reject I am sometimes…

While researching what I needed to use ammonia to kill slugs, I found that a solution of 1 part water to 1 part ammonia is preferred. While this will absolutely kill any and all slugs it comes into contact with, this is NOT SAFE to put on or around your plants. You will very likely give them nitrogen burn like I so brilliantly did yesterday and you may even manage to kill them completely. To say I was having a blonde moment wouldn’t even begin to describe it. I guess I was just so anxious to “rescue” the poor plants from the evil slugs that I didn’t really do enough research. Because, in fact, when you want to use ammonia on your plants you should dilute it massively, using about an 1/8 cup of ammonia to a gallon of water. Yikes!!

My husband was less than enthused at my actions and would probably take all gardening responsibilities away from me if he was home all the time. Well, the plants water themselves at the moment so he may forbid me to go in the greenhouse after all. But I did some damage control today and although it’s not great looking and we would be much better off if I hadn’t been so stupid, I don’t think we are going to end up loosing much because of this. I started over-watering everything today to help flush any ammonia out of the pots and I thankfully didn’t spray most of it on the soil but on the plants…is that thankful? I don’t know.

We did loose our current harvest of stevia which really stinks. It definitely would have been time to pick the leaves that were on there and dry them for sure…but now they’re sad and brown/green so no one will be tasting them. The plants look so pathetic now. I took all these photos after trimming the plants back a bit so you can’t see most of the damage but there’s hardly any leaves left on this thing. Fortunately there are lots of little leaf spouts on the main stems, though, so I am hoping and praying that we get another crop and I didn’t kill these plants completely.

The tomatoes don’t seem to have suffered too drastically. You can see some of the dried out looking leaves in here. I didn’t really trim any of this because (believe it or not) Stefan and his dad thinned out a lot of these plants last weekend so we don’t end up with cherry tomatoes instead of big, juicy tomatoes as they should be. I figure they have been through enough trauma this week so I’ll give them some time to recoop before I do anything else.

Here are the plants that were thinned out…you can barely even tell in the photo, though. We have blooms all over them which I somehow didn’t spray so we should be getting a lot of tomatoes in the coming months! We can’t wait. We got to eat a tiny Red Zebra tomato earlier this week and it was SO good. There really is nothing like home grown tomatoes…and it actually tasted better without salt than with! Go figure.

The eggplants are also a bit burned as you can see on the leaves but I’ve left everything on them for now because the leaves are so major that I didn’t want to do more harm by removing them. It will be interesting to see what happens to these plants this weekend because we have had pretty cool temps lately which they aren’t crazy about…but we are supposed to get into the 90’s this weekend which should be interesting.

And here’s the cucumbers and zucchinis. I had to trim quite a few leaves off the zucchini which were all greyish. I may need to take a few more leaves off the cucumbers that aren’t looking too good but I wanted to check what the “rules” or pruning are first so I don’t end up killing the plants. We have tons of baby cukes on these plants now but they aren’t really growing like crazy…perhaps we have too many leaves on them still and need to thin things out a bit?

I also took the opportunity to harvest the 4 decent sized zucchinis we had on our plants which I’m very much looking forward to eating 😉 They are all between 5 and 8 inches and about 1-3 inches in diameter. If we prepare them the same way we did last time, it will be delectable…perhaps we’ll grill tomorrow after running errands!

As if I haven’t broken enough around here recently, as I walked out the back door of the barn, the upper hinge support came out of the barn wall and the door landed more or less like it is now. This has nothing to do with my brute force, though. We have needed to re-screw the bracket for months now but I guess we just felt there was always something more important to do first. Now we have no choice but to take care of it. Our potato farming neighbors have a bunch of farm cats that roam around and I don’t really want any of them moving into the barn. They’re all nice cats and would leave when asked but we don’t need more pooh to clean up, cats marking territory, etc. Then again, if there are any mice in the barn at the moment, I’m pretty sure those cats will take care of them. Of course then there’s the question of what else could wander in which I won’t even think about…looks kinda quaint, no? 😉

So the morale of this story is…if you’re thinking about using ammonia on your plants to kill slugs – DON’T! Seriously, I’m not sure I would ever use it again in the greenhouse. Instead I will either hand pick the slugs off that I find and drop them in ammonia (which should be really interesting in the end since they kinda dry out when they get sprayed…those that I hit yesterday and found were all black and hollow which was kind of disturbing) or chuck them over the fence or put salt on them (outside of the plants) or something…but no more ammonia in the greenhouse without supervision 🙂