Since moving to Scotland, my biggest garden foe is slugs.
The rich, damp soil mixed with an abundance of greenery
makes the best slug haven in the UK. The size of a stick of gum and black, they
mooch unseen at night amongst the undergrowth searching for their next meal.
That usually means my plants, my fruit and my vegetables.
I view this onslaught as personal.
Last year, to prevent invading weeds
from the field behind my house, I planted fast-growing ground cover plants. To
protect them against slugs, I put the plants in slug collars and surrounded
them with pine needles and crushed eggshells.
But Scottish slugs are as hard as.
They felt no pain crawling over the
pine needles. They pushed aside the crushed eggshells as if they were a trivial
nuisance. They had no fear of heights as they ascended the slug collars like
Spiderman.
Then, they feasted on my plants.
As we have a cat, I can’t use the
traditional chemical methods of slug annihilation and having just Irn Bru in
the fridge, I scoured the internet for a recipe for homemade slug beer. Pretty
quickly, I came across a recipe of water, sugar, flour and dry yeast.
So, I dug out the trenches. Put in
the traps. Filled them with slug beer.
Scottish slugs are as hard as, but they
love my free booze on tap.
Yeah, it’s personal.
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