Week Six - Vegetarian Horticulturalists

I never expected that this might be a contradiction in terms but in the past few weeks I have taken on a passive aggressive hatred towards slugs and mice, and in fact anything that eats the crops which we so lovingly sow.

At the moment slugs are our real problem. The polytunnels are filled with the most beautiful salads, picked daily for the pub and cafe, a real treat in farm boxes and lovingly shipped off to FARM:shop once a week. However, we are beginning to have difficulties now finding leaves which haven’t had little bites taken out of them. It’s not so much the foraging of the slugs that riles me, but the way they go about it. Rather than eating a whole leaf, or in fact plant, what our little critters chose to do is sample a bite from each leaf, moving on to the next as if it might satisfy them further, rendering our poor plants unsuitable for sale.

I know  some might say there is no harm in a salad with a few holes in (and I have a tendency to agree), but believe me, many of our customers would not see it that way; once a leaf is damage it’s fit for nobody but the slugs (or perhaps the interns). In order to counter this damage we are using all sorts of devices, traps and distractions. We have plants surrounded in ground coffee, broken egg shells and the latest, sunken dishes of beer dregs, saved from the bottom of kegs and drip trays at The Jolly Waggoner. The unwitting slugs crawl in seeking the good stuff and are drown, an inebriatingly horrible death. 

Each week when we change the trays I squeal in delight at the number of bodies lying in the waters, and worse still, whilst I’m picking in the mornings I drop every little beasty I find straight into the trap. Quite suddenly I have become a serial slug killer. The delight I take is in the protection of the salad rather than the death of the slugs but it has begun caused me concern. We are all organic growers here so there are no nasty chemicals keeping the critters at bay, consequently we can have no cause for complaint. We’ve created the perfect environment for the slugs, and they are just going about the business of survival – Lucy has taken it upon herself to learn the language of the slug in order to request politely that they eat only the plants designated to them and leave the rest behind.

How is it that we can be so discerning with our own meat consumption, let take no mercy with these little fellows? I guess that I will continue to muddle this one through in my own head.  I know that it isn’t only me who feels this way, many of my colleagues are also veggie, and even those that aren’t  feely the quandary of the slugs... Let’s hope we can find the magic solution (perhaps copper wire or wood ash?) and very soon – I’ll let you know when we’ve got it sussed.