Those *&^(*^% Slugs.

I used to have a thing for slugs. I mean, not that I ever really LIKED them - no gardener can claim to like slugs. They kick you out of the gardening club, sort of like being the one vegetarian who doesn't like tofu. But I thought they were fascinating, and fairly low on the scale of garden pests. This was due largely to the banana slug, which I liked so much after finding out it could fuck for days on end - really - that I made it the topic of an earlier essay. And yes, incidentally, that is one of the many joys of having a blog read by so few. It really frees me up, language-wise.

Anyway, a-hem. So I used to live in the Pacific NW, and of all of my gardening sites, that should have been the most beset by slugs. And I thought it had it bad. I mean, I would set out a beer trap every night and find maybe a dozen slugs in it the next morning. In my whole garden. Which is not to say they weren't destructive - they were. I mean, my NW slugs were large - typically 4-5" - and they ate like a teenage boy at a cruise-ship buffet.

But here I am in Connecticut, where I have these tiny little nothings of mollusks sliming about my garden. A big one is maybe 2.5", and that's stretching it. Literally. But I have thousands of them.

Not to bring you into the middle of a story, but here's the last installment of the artichoke saga (the others will be following, Star-Wars-Prequel-Style, when I get around to it). My kind and generous friend Frank Anastasio gave me four artichoke plants. I was moved. I carried them home. I planted them carefully into my garden along with a heap of organic fertilizer and some compost and lavish amounts of tepid water. The next morning about 80% of their leaf mass was gone.

Slugs.

Blah.

I set out 12 cucumber plants this year, tenderly arrayed along a trellis. I had started them in my tiny greenhouse and hardened them off carefully and they were lush and robust and BEAUTIFUL. And these were not just any cucmbers - they were DIVAS, and I treated them like such.

One week later, I am down to 3. Yes, three. Slugs. I set out two beer traps on either side of the cucmbers. Later that same night, I took a body count. 60 slugs, head-down in the beer. Culled from an area about 24 square feet. At this rate, they are their own biomass. It's a shame you can't use them as fuel or food or something other than my own fiendish cosmic torture.

I called my friend Wayne. Of Wayne's Organic Garden fame. "Erica," he said, "You sound like someone's *died*. You sound distraught."

Well, yes. Because after they took out my Divas, they moved on.

To...

my....

STRAWBERRIES. Oh, strawberries, the whole raison d'etre (quick, is there a French spell-checker in the house? NO? Good.) of home agriculture. I mean really. Because store-bought organic strawberries cost about $3/cup, and my children will eat exactly a week's income-worth in a sitting, and the conventionally raised ones will give you cancer.

So I put in 50 strawberry plants, everbearers, which keep me in berries nicely from June-September. Or they should when they aren't being done in by mollusks too stupid to carry their own shell. Too stupid to not slip head-down into a saucer of beer. But smart enough to realize that life's too short to eat anything less than a perfectly-ripened, organically-grown strawberry.

The Bastards.

I am now reduced to picking my strawberries before they are totally ripe and serving them with sugar and stewing the entire time over how much better they would be if they could just actually RIPEN but NO because the second they are ripe the slugs will move in and leave an opalescent crispy film all over the pathetic stump of a berry I try to pick the next morning.

I even resorted to salting them. When you sprinkle salt on a slug, it turns bright orange and writhes around and eventually dissolves like the witch on the Wizard of Oz (the colorized version) into a slimy puddle of mollusk agony. I did this with a grimace, picturing myself turning on some karmic spit, being sprinkled with caustic granules while my skin peeled off.

There is a reason I am a writer, and the official diagnosis is Overactive Imagination. It was either this or my own personal file with the FBI.

"Ashes," Wayne said, after hearing that I had already tried the beer thing. "God, you're not using good beer, are you?" Wayne sounded a little distraught himself. (For the record, I am using Piels, a beer I had never even heard of before, which was pronounced "disgusting" by the liquor store employee who sold it to me.) "They don't like to cross ashes."

So now I am sprinkling ashes hither and yon, and setting out so many beer traps the Opinionated Liquor Store Employee no longer believes I am not actually quaffing the disgusting Piels by the case, perhaps while gnawing on an uncut block of Velveeta.

To add insult to plant injury, I have realized the source of my slug woes: My compost pile. My compost pile is mostly leaf mold, the coveted stuff that results when you ask your New England neighbors to give you all of their fall leaves and they look at you like you are crazy and perhaps have no taste in beer but they go along with your request because it is easier than bagging them.
And then the leaves break down, forming a lovely crumbly mess of organic matter just perfect for your garden, and haven to millions of beneficial earthworms (also hermaphrodites. Go figure.) And apparently also the Playboy Mansion of Slugdom, where they all go to hang out and cavort and eat too much.

And drink.

Because now I have placed gigantic bowls of beer in and around my compost pile. Within an hour or two, I had scads of slugs face-down at the edges. I flicked them in with a stick, and counted upwards of forty. And in a three-foot radius around the bowls, there were dozens more, radiating inward toward the beer, eyestalks all a-quiver, like the spokes on a giant wheel of mucous all pointing inward to the hub of alcoholic death.

My karma may be toast but my body will feast on cucumbers and strawberries.