Slug Drama

I hate it when my garden turns into slug food. Unfortunately, that has been the theme this year with all this rain. If it seems like a break in the rain is imminent I run out to the garden, but when I get there I'm often just assessing the damage!

Finally Ive caught on to their survival strategies (i.e. eat everything young, tender, and succulent!) and have gone on the offensive to try out some of my own survival strategies. In the past, I can get by with picking the little boogers off and throwing them over the fence. Labor intensive and somewhat cruel, but it seems to work in the short term.

The level of destruction this year is unbelievable. The marigolds we put out were stripped down to stems in nearly one night and the bush bean sprouts were attacked almost as they came out of the ground. A lot of my herbs were decimated in a rather short amount of time as well. I can say that I honestly have not dealt with slug destruction like this before.

I tend to avoid the "beer trap" strategy as it seems too high maintenance especially with rain on the horizon. The beer gets washed out when it rains and its really gross when the slugs die in them. It does get expensive when you have to keep changing the beer out and the check out person at the grocery store is starting to wonder about me, the woman with the baby buying endless amounts of Steel Reserve.

Finally, I broke down and bought the slug-bait-for-organic-gardeners. Kind of expensive and I had to go to two different stores to get it!! I guess I am not the only one in Portland having to bust out the big guns. I will cross my fingers and pray for all this slug drama to be over. In the meantime I will try and think of what the slugs are trying to teach me. Perhaps a lesson in perseverance because I know it's not a lesson in pacifism!