You Don’t Want to Know What I Did With Them…

 

A friend gave me two sunflowers.

“Watch out,” she warned, “slugs like them too.”

I knew that already.

I can not grow sunflowers as there are so many slugs in my garden; this despite the fact that I have a pond that over the years has turned out frogs in the hundreds.

So with these two sunflowers I found a spot and fashioned for them a silvery girdle of aluminium foil. I cut the edges of the foil into sharp pointy spikes thinking that no slug would ever risk tearing its thin flesh on such material no matter what mouth watering treat awaited them at the end.

I even set out broken egg shells around the stems so any such soft bellied intruders would slice themselves to pieces.

Well that was the plan.

I don’t know what the slugs do at night, after partying with the frogs, but I do know I have the SAS of the slug world living in my garden: the ones that use spider’s webs as zip lines, or the ones that climb up the trees and then bomb themselves bodily onto their target plant, and the ones that use blades of grass to catapult themselves over any mine fields and traps. I have that type of slug.

And yep! The very next day I go out to look, and one of my plants has folded over onto itself. And yep! When I take an even closer look its stem has been eaten away. And nope! A sticking plaster repair will not fix the damage.

I check the defences. They are all in order. And then I realise that I have the sappers of the slug world: the miners, the tunnellers, the sneaky creepy underworld type of slug.

I lift the foil and yep! There they all are enjoying the shade of the foil and nestling against the moist earth their fat stomachs breathing in and out contentedly as they listen to the fat bloated snoring of their companions.

I won’t tell you what I did with them… I won’t mention the sharp stones and the quick stabbing movements, or the sandwiching of slug between two very hard bricks. I will simply report that I took no prisoners.

I then cleared out their tunnels. There were no slugs alive when I left.

That was yesterday.

Today I checked again.

The other plant is now listing.

And yet again I found slugs. They had snuggled under the aluminium foil and were sleeping soundly as if under a light weight summer duvet. These were small tiny things. I won’t tell you what I did with them.

I’ve improved the ramparts yet again.

I’ve put dried pine needles around the sunflower to impale any that dares to cross no slug land … but I know that they will outwit me no matter what I do. I have that kind of slug.