The Slugs are Back!
And we still have a hosepipe ban...
In the south east of England we have a hosepipe ban. That news will raise no eyebrows among those of you who live in this region. I cannot recall a summer during which the authorities did not impose a ban on householders watering gardens and lawns, washing cars or house windows. They exhort us to go to great lengths to cut back our use of water: take shorter showers, not flush the loo every time, re-use dishwashing water to keep flowers alive and so on.
Visitors have long known that, unless they are the mains-pressure variety, British showers are pathetic compared to those in America and elsewhere. Their output is often compared to the annoying British drizzle which has plagued our tourist industry for so long. But now, the water companies offer (free of charge) special devices to insert into the shower head to reduce the flow of water even further. They assert the aeration produced by the device makes you think you get the same volume of water …but you don’t. Evidence of reduced flow from the shower head (during your regulation 4-minute session) is that soap is harder to remove. Towelling off and donning clothes becomes a sticky process. And if you wash your hair..? Ha, ha, ha, ha….. Is spikey hair in fashion again??
But I digress! It’s the story of my life…
During what has turned out to be a prolonged hot spell (ok, by British standards – alright?) I began to think that the tide of battle against the hated gastropod foe was turning in my favour. My regimen of scattering slug pellets and nightly forays around the flower beds and lawn edges, armed with a head torch, fork and jar of salted water appeared to be working. The yield of slimy enemies dropped and dropped until it reached zero for several nights on the trot.
I remained vigilant. There were flowers on the courgette plants – not many, but there were some, promising at least a modest crop this year. Hey, I could look forward to stuffing some of the flowers with ricotta and mozzarella cheese and baking them for a seasonal treat. Yum! Some had not yet flowered, though. Never mind – there was still time. I recall a year when we were subsumed in a glut of the things all at once, so to have production naturally phased like this was a boon.
Night after sticky night, (it was humid), my patrols yielded nothing. Zilch. No slimy trails, no nibbled shoots. I observed visiting starlings stalking the lawn boundaries in the early mornings, jabbing their beaks into the space between the timber siding and the pavers. Were they finding some? Hard to say, as I don’t speak ‘Starling’, but they seemed pretty pissed off to me. There was much arguing going on, almost as though one was saying, “You told us to come here, Frank. I said there would be no slugs. Now we are here, there aren’t any slugs. Didn’t I say that? Did you listen? You never listen to me. And another thing…”
And then… Big News! First one and then two more of the courgette plants turned out to be squashes of some sort. Instead of producing those lovely yellow flowers from the base, they sent out horizontal runners, as though aiming for the path to make a getaway. At the ends of the runners, there began to form small buds. What be these?
I watched. And waited.
And one morning, just as I had begun to look up recipes for baked squash with sage leaves and lots of salt and pepper, those tiny buds developed marks. Close examination suggested gnawing by …duh, duh, duuuuuh… Slugs. Dammit!
Ok – action stations. How can I summon back the starlings? Wrapping the nascent fruits in netting is the emergency measure I’ve adopted – to present some sort of physical barrier which might put off the slimy marauders. I’ve scheduled an emergency trip to the garden centre to buy fresh slug pellets.
Will these measures succeed? Perhaps if I can protect the tender growth long enough, the fruits won’t be appetising any more once they reach a certain size? Am I fooling myself? Is the autumn going to be like a film sequel – “Return of the Giant Slugs”?
