Cut grass and night-shift slugs
THE rain and heat brought the slugs, revealing a clinging meniscus of slime, a bonanza adventure time for them into the known and unknown in the still of the night.
Earlier, they almost bid me ‘good morning’ as I stepped by, intent on examining two Lilliputian wild meadows. I peer into this rainforest of stems hoping to identify the different growths in a fascinating world with memories of fields and swards of variety, once in abundance before all became a green monoculture.
I try to remember the fescues, vernals, timothys, couch, bents, false oats, dogs tails and Yorkshire fog and an endless litany of names like different tribes resolutely inhabiting the same space without killing one another mercilessly.
I had to cut a small track, carefully, remembering Philip Larkin’s contemplation: “Cut grass lies frail/Brief is its breath/Mown stalks exhale/ Long, long the death.” He added, in explanation: “It dies in the white hours of youngleafed June.”
The poet was also upset that, while mowing, he struck a hedgehog; it became jammed between the blades. He never used the machine again. I, once scything a fair meadow in Meath, also hit one of these little animals. It let out a cry. I searched but
couldn’t find it. I hoped it had got away, though perhaps only to die in a ditch or, incapacitated, be eaten by a prowling badger.
The slugs seemed to be waiting for me. Their tracks are thick and sticky, their eyes at the tips of their tentacles. All that stickiness prevents desiccation and gives them protection against enemies.
Slugs like to slither on old surfaces perhaps holding microscopic particles from ancient sandy shores.
There are about 30 species which set out on long journeys. Most will devastate unprotected kitchen garden crops before dawn, equipped with four noses and tentacles which can detect food from three metres off over an area of 45 square metres of travel.
Thousands of teeth can make short shrift of root crops and herbaceous
plants. When the blitzkrieg is over they head homewards on their slimy highways — if magpies don’t get them first.
Traditional barriers to curb them include coffee grounds, ash, fine gravel, grapefruit skins, copper garden tape, parasitic eel-worms, and nematodes who feed on them. Onions, garlic and chives are old deterrents — and you could also try drink! Bury a container of old beer leaving a rim of about one inch so that useful spiders and beetles won’t fall in. The slugs’ sense of smell will lead them to a boozy end.
If you have access to poultry, especially ducks, all problems will be solved. Ducks suck them up and won’t plunder plant beds.
You could also go round at night with a flashlight and bucket picking them up and be glad you hadn’t found an overseas visitor called Achatina fulica which is as big as a banana with an appetite to match. I have not heard of any turning up here. I wonder what magpies would make of them?