Puzzled – can anyone enlighten me?
I came across a couple of, what I presume are, clusters of eggs in the garden soil and wondered what these are?
Click on image to enlarge
The size of the round (eggs) is approx. 1 – 3 mm, the diameter of the cylindrical cluster is approx. 15-20 mm, the colours are yellow (pale mustard) with a few blue (almost cobalt).
They look like sections of baby sweetcorn without the central core.I am intrigued to know what this is – can anyone tell me?
Saskia
Puzzled?
Thursday July 25, 2013 by Blog Team
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Saskia, do you think they are hatched eggs or unhatched? If hatched, it may mean that the colour has changed from the original.
They are about the size of snail eggs but they are usually a translucent white colour, and I have not seen them in such large clusters.
Peter, most eggs appear to have hatched. Your suggestion of snail eggs does match more closely with some of the results of Googled images, though I have yet to find a picture of this unusual combination of yellow and cobalt blue (the photo doesn’t do the blue colour justice). Would it be reasonable to assume that the eggs could have been deposited in a section of hollow stem (e.g. from a teezle) that has since disintegrated, resulting in the perfect cylindrical shape of one of the clusters?
Saskia, looking on line raises the possibility that they are not eggs, but a slow release plant fertiliser, see
http://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=46677
Could they have come with a plant from a garden centre?
Well I never … I guess you could be right. I could easily have emptied an old plant pot, not noticing the nuggets. The Osmocote ‘Potshots’ look very similar indeed, other than that my clusters have the odd cobolt-coloured ‘egg’!
Thanks, Peter.
Saskia, I found these in a plant pot that has just come from a garden centre:
Looks like one of the staff had baked beans for lunch. p.s there is an excellent over the counter ointment for a touch of the “cobalt clusters”.