Any Iowa yard animal knows by now that I get crazy when critters mess with my stuff. The thing is, I like critters--I take pictures of spiders, I tell Henry not to crush anthills, I even convinced Maria recently that two snakes out in our yard was an answer to some of her prayers. But critters that eat my plants are not answers to prayers. They are horrible, horrible things that choosed to disrupt the golden chain of being and operate outside of their stewardship. Those dirty terrible animals include slugs, aphids, rabbits, moles, and deer, and they have no reason to be kept alive. Last year, I had a considerable battle with some rabbits that led to convincing my neighbor to get a gun and shoot them. The blood was not on my hands that way. I don't care how cute the varmints are--one could pop out of the ground chewing on a carrot and call me "doc" and I'd still want to kill it.
Well, the great thing about slugs is that I don't need a gun to kill them and they don't bleed. In fact, they do the opposite of bleeding. Once you kill them, they evaborate into a dried paste and you can power wash them off like the gunner from his turret. Killing slugs also provides the pleasure of nostalgia. When I was a child living in Fresno and waiting for the school bus, Mark and I would grab as many snails as we could find and we would make lines of them on the street. Whosever line was run over by the bus's tires won that day's contest. We also used to pack in 20 to 30 snails on a single brick and then try to drop another brick from head level onto the loaded brick, counting how may were smashed with each drop. In other words, the mass killing of slugs has come to really mean a lot to me.
On Wednesday night, I went out with a very large jar of salt and killed slugs. I killed over 100 of them, and it was reported by neighbors that I was screaming insults as I went about my business. One neighbor said he heard, "how do you feel now, *&$%!?!?!" I don't recall the exact wording because I don't recall the state of warfare very clearly, but at least I let the slugs know how I felt about them. There is now salt all over my cabbage and hostas, and I bet that salt will mess up my soil, but I am pretty sure the mass killing of 100 slugs was worth a little soil inconvenience. I am going out again tonight.
All this would be good, not annoying, if it weren't for the fact that for every slug I killed, there are probably 50 waiting in the wings. Slugs are pansexual in the true sense of the term, and they copulate with whatever slimy thing moves in their path, so they make babies faster than rabbits do. They are also genderless, so they can all have babies regardless. At least rabbits have the dignity to allow only one of their sexes to give birth. Slugs have no dignity. In fact, they spend all day hiding under stray boards and dirt clods because they don't like the sun, they eat 300 times their body weight every day, and leave slime wherever they go. Whenever I tell people that I have a problem with slugs, they seem surprised because slugs are not much of a pest in Iowa. (Apparently, slugs are all gardeners talk about in the Pacific Northwest, though) This is the annoyance. Why did the slugs choose me? Why my yard, my cabbages? It might have to do with the huge compost box that is effectively the centerpiece of our garden and lawn. There is nothing like a centerpiece of old grass clippings, rotten tomatoes, moldy bread and pineapple rinds that smells like vomit whenever I stir it around. I assume this is heaven for such dignity-less animals as slugs, so I am assuming it is the culprit.
When I was a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I salted slugs with my siblings for summer fun. Cruelly, we watched them shrivel one by one. We had neighbors who lured them with beer, which may have been more humane, but there was no beer at our house.
ReplyDeleteTwo summers ago my eldest daughter chose to plant cabbage in her EarthBox, and then she left town for a month. In her absence, I dutifully waged the Cabbage War against the cabbage worms, power-washing them out from the base of the plant between the leaves and leaving them to desiccate on the driveway. Some of my children liked to squash them. I did this in my daughter's behalf, even though the worms persisted in reappearing daily. Cabbage worms are actually the larvae of the cabbage moth, which explains how they got into the pristine EarthBox to begin with. The thing is, I don't really eat much cabbage either. All of my children--except the eldest, who is a fan of Chinese food--dislike it. But I love my daughter.
All of which is to say: I'm with you, man.
I know that you can use egg shell pieces to keep snails out of a garden so I assume that would work for slugs too. Hope that helps.
ReplyDeleteI wish the Amish farmers providing me with their certified organic lettuce knew about this trick.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing to do is to get a snake and put it in your garden. I wonder if the Amish would do something like that? My neighbor put beer out the other night and three enormous slugs were drowned the next morning. I still think salt is the way to go. We pulled our cabbage, which means I lost the war I guess, but we probably weren't going to eat choy anyway.
ReplyDeleteI have heard about the egg shells, but I would need lots of egg shell in order to cover my garden, and you can really only do the egg shells from hard-boiled eggs, otherwishe the slime skin membrane is attached and the slugs can move on right past them.