Dad in a fierce battle with a ‘tsunami’ of slugs in his garden

A dad is at war with a ‘tsunami’ of slugs each night in his £10,000 garden – as his wife begs him to come back indoors.

Mike Dinnebier has had to take drastic measures to protect the tropical paradise he has spent thousands on in his back garden in Hethersett, Norfolk.

After his wife and one-year-old daughter have gone to sleep, he sneaks down to his garden at midnight with a head torch and bucket to pick slugs off of his plants by hand.

The 33-year-old said he originally tried cutting holes behind his sheds to encourage hedgehogs and frogs to come into his garden and eat the pests – but they ‘couldn’t keep up’.

Due to the sheer volume of the slithery creatures, he has had to take matters into his own hands and now essentially acts as a security guard for the plants, with nightly visits at 8pm and midnight.

Mike said he does not want to put slug pellets out because if hedgehogs eat slugs that have consumed them, they too will be unwell.

Mike said: ‘This year because it was so wet over spring and it was a really wet start to the winter, the slugs really took hold.

‘There’s been so many slugs this year that they [the plants] were just kind of taken over and the hedgehogs and frogs couldn’t keep up. They usually keep them under control, I’ve never seen a single slug in the three years before this.

‘This spring if I’ve seen any new growth it’s always been eaten by the slugs so I’ve had to physically remove them this year. I just pick them off the plants and put them in a bucket and get rid of them.’

Mike has to get up at 5am for work each morning but is out there at midnight most nights because it’s when the creatures are most active.

He said: ‘They still manage to get a bit of a hold of it, a lot of the plants have got loads of nibble holes but the damage was reduced so it is definitely worth it.’

The most expensive plants in Mike’s garden are three tree ferns that were imported from New Zealand that he bought for £600 during COVID.

He said they can take about a hundred years to grow to six foot tall and that the same tree ferns are selling for about £700 each now.

Mike also spent a couple of months trying to source a blue tinted bamboo plant that cost him £100.

The father-of-one makes formula one car parts for a living, and after work he picks up his daughter Nora from nursery and looks after her until his wife Jasmine, 30, finishes work.

Mike said Nora loves spending time looking at plants in the garden, in particular she is fascinated by his 33 varieties of Venus flytraps, but that Jasmine does not always share the same sentiment.

Mike said: ‘I get moaned at for being in the garden too much. She’s like ‘you need to come inside and spend some more time with me’.

‘She likes the end result, like me. I like the end result, the gardening itself is a little bit of a chore but the end result is worth it. She puts up with it because it’s worth it.’

Mike currently spends between 15 and 20 hours a week gardening and although he has been working on his garden since 2019, he still has future plans to build a patio to host even more plants.

Mike and Jasmine moved into their house in Hethersett, Norfolk, in 2019 because of the one acre garden it had so their three Shih Tzu dogs, Alfie, Brody and Cooper, could have more room to run around.

He said when they moved in the garden was covered in brambles and nettles and they used a mini digger to clear the garden out so they could start from scratch.

Shortly after moving in, his parents gave him a banana plant as a birthday present and this sparked Mike’s passion for plants and this spurred him on to order more.

This involved growing new plants from scratch by taking cuttings from those already in his garden.

Over winter, Mike even dug some of his plants up and brought them into his conservatory which was kept heated to about twenty degrees to make sure they survived.

He also holds open gardens advertised on his Facebook page, named Hethersett’s Hidden Tropical Garden, where he sells and swaps plants with people in his local area.

Mike said: ‘I was spending from sunlight to sundown everyday out here doing something in the garden. It kept getting more and more and more and before you know it there’s thousands of plants in the garden and they’re all taking up most of the garden.

‘There’s not much grass space. I’m obviously out here every day and it gets a bit tedious sometimes.

‘You can spend an entire day out here and do weeding and you look at it and it’s like it’s no different to the way it looked this morning and I’ve just been out here for eight hours. I’m just getting tired now and I’m not seeing any change.

‘But when everyone comes along and is like this is really good it lifts your hopes back up and gives you the appreciation back again.’

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