Mukilteo Musings

Slugs

Slugs never cease to amaze me. We have the biggest slugs in the world around here. The largest are the banana slugs we see when we are hiking. They are the size of a hot dog and an incredible golden color. Sometimes when I am cleaning up Apolo piles in the back yard, I mistake brown and black slugs for....you know. But, it doesn't matter because they get scooped up just the same. Slugs eat garden flowers, bushes and vegetables. Many theories exist about how to get rid of them but most are feeble attempts to control that do not actually work.

We have learned to avoid plants that slugs love. You can buy this slug bait which is a thick gray goo kind of like toothpaste to squirt in circular patterns around flowers. When the slugs hit the barrier, they die and shrivel. The problem is, dogs love to lick the gray goo and it is highly toxic to them. You can also buy this stuff that looks like cereal to sprinkle in the garden but the same issue--dogs like to scarf it down. An organic control method is to leave flat pans full of beer all around the yard. The slugs crawl in to happily gurgle in the amber liquid and they drown.

We have not tried the beer method for three reasons: 1) We do not drink beer and I'm not sure wine works. 2) Apolo would probably love the beer and after several pans full, I'm not sure he'd make it up the steps into the house. 3) And who wants a yard littered with pans of beer full of dead slugs? I'd rather have dead flowers.

So the slugs win in our yard---except when I am pooper scooping. Here are some of our residents.


Apolo nosed him and he/she shrugged.


He/she is pulling a load of bark.


Possibly the same slug as in the first picture--it just took him/her three days to travel from the side of the house to the back.

Why couldn't these be poor person's escargot? One of these days, I am going to boil these guys/gals in butter with tons of garlic and basil and try them.