Slug Wars and Story-telling

First, an explanation for this vaguely unpleasant title! Why would any writer begin his SubStack life by teasing potential readers and followers with an off-putting monicker?

I have accepted many challenges in my life.

Some I sought out. I blame youthful testosterone for those.

Some happened to me. I look to youthful inexperience and naivety for my failure to dodge them in time.

The remainder..? I’m not sure how to categorise the vast majority, though. Maybe I can get away with saying they are all parts of Life’s Rich Pageant.

Fans of the American alternative Rock band, R.E.M. will recognise that saying as the title of one of their albums.

Film fans will recall Peter Sellars’ gloriously-observed character Inspector Clouseau – it was a phrase from one of his monologues.

In this case, my lovely writing friend Annette Shaw (‘A.R.Shaw’) took note of one of my emailed rants and stuck down the phrase as the working title of this …’blog’? Do I call this a blog? I see it as an opportunity. It’s a more grown-up way of looking at challenges.

Woah, there. This isn’t going to turn into one of those preachy, holier-than-thou management guru expositions, I promise. Oh, sure it’s been said before – ‘Treat challenges as Opportunities, not Threats’ – but really, you don’t have to do as I do.

I’ll explain. At this time of year, in the UK, amateur gardeners of all levels of ability set out a range of plants. They hope for lovely flowers to admire or tasty vegetables to eat later in summer. The ‘setting out’ bit might be sowing seeds directly into the soil (raking lightly afterwards to shield from hungry birds), or planting tender seedlings, home-produced or purchased from a store.

‘Occasional gentle watering’ is all the packet says will be necessary in order to enjoy the bounty illustrated in the picture.

Charles Darwin might have observed that, as in so much of Nature, evolutionary changes in various species are prompted by such regularity.

I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but I now see that what I always considered to be among the lowest of dumb creatures, the Gastropods, are capable of rapid adaptation. Wikipedia writes, without humour, that, ‘After several years with continuous moist weather conditions abundance can seriously increase.’

All of you will know that Great Britain is known for ‘continuous moist weather conditions’. Let’s call this meteorological phenomenon ‘C.M.W.’ Many of us consider the carrying of an umbrella in mid-July to be a perfectly normal and acceptable practice. You know, in case of a recurrence or sudden onset of C.M.W.

I’m here to tell you that 2023 and 2024 brought CMW to new levels. And those little b@st@rds know it. They know when Mr and Mrs Smith spend hours on their knees, introducing their expensive purchases to the nourishing soil. In fact, I’m convinced, they hide at the edges of the beautifully-tended flower and vegetable beds chuckling away and rubbing their hands together (or whatever…) in anticipation of the feast being put before them.

Even if they weren’t there watching the planting, there must be some long-range communication method. Individuals of the family Agriolimacidae can travel forty feet in a night – quite enough to move from one garden to the next in the road.

At this time of year, when the clock suggests normal humans retire to bed, I don my old running head torch and arm myself with Slug Hunter weapons. These include an old camping fork and an empty tin can or half a plastic water bottle. The container is for my salt solution. The fork enables me to collar the slimy miscreants with the minimum of handling. Thus armed, I sally forth, imitating the Downward Dog pose every couple of feet. I lift leaves, I part stems to peer into the green environment of a clump of mint.

To date, I am sad to say, we have none of our courgettes left. None. Zero. Not even a sad little green sprig which optimistically might one day produce a leaf. The radishes have obviously witnessed some pitched battle between heavily-armed small warriors, shooting at each other for hours. To say their leaves are ragged is considerable understatement.

The sacrificial marigolds are reduced to bare stems, some with a single remaining flower head, like a wounded soldier holding aloft his regiment’s standard on the only unconquered redoubt. Last night, I found an especially large Agriolimacidae Deroceras Reticulatum performing the slug equivalent of a bear-hug on a marigold flower stem. As I watched, the orange/yellow flower toppled to the soil, its supporting fibres having been chomped through. The standard has fallen. The colonel, no doubt dead with it.

It’s very distressing.

Other friends have given me helpful suggestions. These include baited traps, Nematodes, poisoned pellets and why don’t I spread unwanted vegetable leaves and trimmings onto the soil for them to eat instead?

The old-fashioned poison pellets are not an option for me. I can’t rid my head of the thought that the vegetable I’m eating will have taken up poison from the soil.

Baited traps? Maybe. I read that they love flour, water, yeast and sugar – that sounds like my sourdough starter plus a spoon of sugar. I might try that. Someone else suggested using beer in the trap. Nope. Cheap beer? Not even that. What a waste…

How about Nematodes? These microscopic roundworms can be bought, dried, in packets. You scatter them on the soil, rehydrate and they enter the slugs, distribute some deadly bacteria which kills the animal and then the nematodes eat what remains. They work above and below the soil. Sounds perfect. Indeed, even the Royal Horticultural Society recommends them. But am I too late, now?

And, I mustn’t forget birds! They lurve slugs and other creepy-crawlies. Wait. All the birds go to bed around the same time as we normal human beings do. Yet the bountiful slug-fest awaits them in the hours of darkness.

Maybe Charles Darwin wasn’t quite right, then.

What do you all think?