20,000 reasons to love slugs...
WE all love slugs don’t we? Nothing arouses more disgust and gagging than your friendly slug, pottering around your garden just looking for something to nibble on.
You know, I was on a nature reserve the other day and took some pictures of a large black slug. As I got home and looked a bit closer I was fascinated that this unloved gastropod was rather lovely.
It has cute little tentacles and a fancy orange and black-striped skirt around its body. It was feeding on some rotten vegetable matter, which was just making the place look a mess. And remember that slugs do provide food for hedgehogs, newts, toads and song thrushes, so they are not all bad news.
Let’s discuss some of the disgusting facts about slugs. The first one is that the slug’s blood is actually a bluey-green colour. That makes our slugs a little bit of royalty in the garden world.
If a slug gets lost in your garden it can find its way home because it has left a scent trail. The slug can find its way back because it uses its body to smell that trail.
A slug is a snail without a shell and is a gastropod, which means ‘stomach foot’. A slug is just a muscular foot moving around your garden.
As the weather warms to above 5C, slugs appear on our patio. But when you think that only five percent of slugs are above ground at any one time, there must be a lot more eating flower roots and seeds under the soil and the grass. It’s been estimated that more than 200,000 slugs can live under one acre of a farmer’s field.
Julie, my better half, often complains about the odd slug getting into the house. I try to put her mind at ease by saying it’s just an odd one brought in by the dog on his paws. It’s probably not! It’s probably squeezed in through a hole or a gap. A slug can stretch to 20 times its length so it can get through the smallest holes.
And here’s the best bit – a slug has more than 20,000 teeth to eat your prize plants.
I do feel sorry for the slug because it’s a pretty amazing creature, curling up and rocking from side-to-side to confuse predators. Its slime trail seems impossible to remove, but you can generally just roll it up like glue and flick it away.
Let’s face it there isn’t much chance of us eradicating slugs. I use nematoids (microscopic bugs) to attack them naturally in the soil and you can surround plant pots with Vaseline and copper.
Our top tip is to keep slug food to pots and barrels, where you can protect them and grow things they don’t like in the rest of the garden. Then leave it to the hedgehogs and song thrushes.
The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside is dedicated to the protection and promotion of the wildlife in Lancashire, seven boroughs of Greater Manchester and four of Merseyside, all lying north of the River Mersey. It manages around 40 nature reserves and 20 Local Nature Reserves covering acres of woodland, wetland, upland and meadow. The Trust has 27,000 members, and over 1,200 volunteers.
To become a member of the Trust go to the website at www.lancswt.org.uk or call 01772 324129. For more information about Cheshire Wildlife Trust call 01948 820728 or go to cheshirewildlifetrust.org. uk.