baby limes, lavender, beetroot
Canon 5D3 with EF100L macro lens

This very, very, very likely is not why you read this blog – there is no music or sound or visual aspect… But if you grow your own food, then one thing that may or may not drive you a little crazy is… goddamn snails & slugs beating you to the best food! Grrrrrrr!

Last Spring I thought I would be clever and start all my veges from seed… Previously I had bought punnets of seedlings from our local plant store, as it made it easy & reliable as you could choose good healthy looking seedlings and it was like getting a jump start on the new season. But last year in very early Spring I planted my seeds & they would sprout, get going a little bit & then just… disappear! So despite my best attempts I ended up buying established seedlings again.

But I slowly realised what the actual problem was: slugs & snails were sneaking in at night & eating all of the sprouts! At first I was a little squeamish & would just scoop up any slugs or snails I found with a trowell & launch them into the bush reserve at high velocity…

During COVID19 lockdown one of the projects I got-around-to finishing was greenhouse #2 – this greenhouse is a bit bigger, and is also closer to the house so one of my aims is to grow all the vegetables I eat often in there, so I don’t have to traipse down to the other end of the garden at dinner time… So for example currently I have about 50 lettuce plants growing in there, along with tomatoes, a tamarillo tree, two olive trees, four Satsuma mandarin trees, a lime plant etc etc… And guess what? Every night I go out to check and I will find 10-20 slugs and snails sliming their way around my precious veges, happily munching away… until I detect them & CRUSH THEM! Lets just say I have grown to like the sound of them being crushed underfoot…

While I’d like to think I am eradicating them & surely their numbers must drop if I am crushing all the mummies & daddies, I am yet to see evidence of that… They keep on coming! So I started thinking about other means of stopping them. I had heard people say crushed up egg shells can stop them, and I know some people use chemicals (eg derris dust) but the whole point of having a garden to me is to avoid all the crap that commercial supermarket vegetables get sprayed with… So I started to wonder if maybe I could electrocute the little fckrs! Next stop Youtube!

Comparing slug control methods: Coffee, Eggshells, Paprika, Diatomaceous earth
Shortcut: ALL FAILED!

Comparing slug control methods: Copper foil, Aluminum foil, Wire brush, Copper foil with 9volts!
Shortcut: ALL FAILED except the 9 volt electric fence!

How to DIY an electric fence for an entire garden, with successful test examples!

It’s like a primary school taunt:
“If you love your 303 so much why don’t you marry it!”

Or the bar fight version, when you wake up with an indent in your face:
“Did you get smacked in the head last night… by a 303??”

I’d be more keen if it had wireless control of a squelchy filter…
that was applicable to *every* audio source within earshot!

I got talking with a random muso at the garden centre…
I asked him what genre he was into & he pointed at this:

Infamous Haikyo House

Ordered these ages ago & they sat in a postal warehouse in NY for a month or two… Perfect for stealth recording! The one on the right came with a card: “do not wear while driving, smoking or swimming”
DOH! Ok, if you insist!

Did you know the NZ $50 note has Sir Apirana Ngata, a Kōkako and some blue mushrooms on it?

From a dreamy lake on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand!

The end of the road he was referring to back in 2010 was “four years in federal prison for defrauding investors of nearly $4 million in an investment scheme”

“Legendary” fake sound designer aka convicted fraudster Brice Carrington was back in the news last week:
“Antonio Wilson, also known as “Dr. Tony Mariot” and “Brice Carrington… accused of romancing “black-ish” star Jenifer Lewis and three other women to con them out of money for his phony businesses agreed Friday to plead guilty to a federal charge of wire fraud, prosecutors said.
Antonio Wilson, 57, of Santa Monica, acknowledged conning the women in the plea agreement filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement. He was expected to plead guilty at a later hearing.
Wilson, also known as “Dr. Tony Mariot” and “Brice Carrington,” fleeced his victims out of nearly $400,000 that he claimed were investments in his sound design company and software business, prosecutors said.

2010 Designing Sound article
2020 Hollywood Reporter article