Mulched Lilies

I finally got the lily bed all mulched again. Every year I rake up the lawn clippings and mulch these Asiatic lilies with them. That's all the fertilizer they have ever gotten and they are thriving. I do have to treat the bed with Sluggo to keep the slugs under control. When I first moved to the island we only had to contend with the native banana slugs. They were enough of a problem but 10 or so years ago we were invaded with European slugs, an invasive species that makes the banana slugs look like pets. These guys are voracious eaters and fantastic reproducers. They have to be dealt with.

We mow the lawn not to keep a suburban look but to keep the jungle at bay and to produce mulch for the perennial flower beds. If we let the lawn go for a year the blackberries and rose bushes and fir trees and plum seedlings and snowberries and....would be back in spades. When we moved to this place it had been abandoned for bout 40 years and all of the above were crowding the house. It took about 5 years of hard labor to push it all back to the edges. I expect that when we are gone they will just take over again.