Garden: Slugs Vanquished?

Slugs everywhere.  Spanish slugs, leopard slugs, small brown, stripey grey and luminescent white slugs have plagued our Pyrenees garden since the very first season trying to feed ourselves from our denuded patch of clay subsoil.  I resisted the temptation to use slug pellets, stopped sowing seeds direct into the ground and began spring and summer nightly Slug Hunting patrols.

Last year I counted the number collected just from the potager and was staggered to find it was over fourteen thousand of the slimy munchers.  But this year, things felt different; evening slugs patrols were often in the company of hedgehogs and almost every time  I put fork or trowel to soil I would uncover glow worm larvae.  It was magical..

Developing a Glow Worm Colony

Followers of this Blog will know that we have a lot of slugs.  An awful lot of slugs.  And snails, although as these are regularly collected, purged and eaten they are perhaps less of a pest!  We are tyring to make the garden as attractive as possible to any slug munchers out there.

Slug Hunting

Slugs on Honesty

When we first started trying to grow vegetables in our clay field nothing ever  seemed to germinate.  A single evening springtime walk revealed seedlings germinating like mad, but like baby turtles on a beach, they were being snaffled equally quickly by an army of slimy predators before they could make it to the relative safety of the morning.  The ground, the hedges, the walls  were a heaving mass of slugs – big orange ones, small brown ones, stripy ones and black ones, revolting white ones which exude a milky gunk when prodded and even a magnificent leopard slug or two.