How to garden with slugs without losing your soul. PART ONE

Perhaps the best pest in the garden today is our apparently infinite selection of slugs. Born as tiny clear pinheads they grow rapidly, gorging on our favourite green vegetation, until some are as big as sausages.

Slugs eat everything they can, including taking the odd chunk out of one another. Given the choice however, they like the most delicate of plant parts. With enough rainfall and they have the ability to eat a whole newly sewn garden crop in less than one night.

Soft-bodied gardeners, normally remain pleasant and patient have turned frothy lipped to murder, eviction, poison and maim without apology. Our gardens have become a battleground with one particular party taking the whole thing very personally.  But consider the cost, when we find ourselves so angry and defeated in our very own green zone? What herbivores don’t consider, as they sprinkle the salt, is the damage they are doing to their own soul.

Slugs are not out to get us, they are just grabbing a quick bite at teatime and, so what you don’t like the look or feel of them? Slugs probably think we take more than our fair shares sometimes too.

However hope of reconciliation is here; salvation and soul damage retrieval could be close at hand. There is something you can do.

Creating a slug sanctuary, in the form of a well-sealed, in full sun compost container where these slow movers can be safely rehoused, this simple step turns every sighting from a gnashing of teeth to a moment of excitement. Assiduous after-dark collections and relocating slugs into a compost bin of weeds where they can eat away happily whilst creating pure soil in the process is as easy as a walk in the park.

Slugs have as much right to be on planet as we do, without their work we would be knee high in rotting vegetation by now. Simply going about their daily business of eating and excreting, slugs could be seen as soil enhancers of the first order. A beneficial being whose ability to break down plant matter into soil means that they can speed up the process of composting beyond many a wildest dream.

Like any creature, they need boundaries to stop them over reproducing and running amok but given a half decent composter they can munch their whole body weight in less than twenty minutes and keep on munching for a very long, long time. Think how much compost they produce as they chow down hard in your service. Unfortunately for them their eggs will not survive the heat and it is also even rumoured that slug ‘Nematode’ will flourish in such environs.

From their point of view, a compost bin is a damp, safe from predator bird haven, filled with their favourite munch material. So as you walk your little charge on a trowel towards it’s new home, you can hold on to your heart knowing that you are taking them to a place they would call “heaven”.