mildew, slugs & retribution in the strawberry patch

Learning from the Garden

"You don't have a slug excess, you've got a duck deficit!"
Bill Mollison Permaculture expert

It started with the strawberries. I’d planted 25 of 4 different varieties last year, including a heritage variety, Raritan, which I can no longer get from my supplier. This spring, they leafed out and bloomed beautifully and I expected a bumper crop of beautiful berries to eat and sell at the farmer’s market after a warm and dry April. All gardeners know that assumptions about future crops are foolish and doomed to disappointment, and this was no exception. May and June were record months for rain and low temperatures, and I didn’t discover that slugs were ravaging the ripening berries, covered with netting to protect them from the birds, until it was too late to save most of the crop.

I’ve loved and been fascinated by insects since childhood, had bug collections, and took entomology courses in college, but slugs and snails are not insects, they are gastropods, a class of animals second only to insects in number of known species. This is where I get ashamed to write what happened in the strawberry patch on a drippingly moist June evening when I discovered the damage and hand picked about 200 slugs: I took the bucket of slugs floating in soapy water to the middle of my dirt road and dumped it. Next I took out a box of kosher salt and watched while slugs shrank like the wicked witch of the west into tiny pools of slime. I could almost hear them scream, “I’m shrinkiiinng!” I considered waiting until cars ran what was left of them over but that seemed a little extreme.

Then I remembered doing the same thing to garden snails as a very young child on our front steps in California and the horrid fascination I had in watching something so other, so alien, retract, sizzle and die by my hand and with my mother’s salt shaker. I’m confessing to both acts (but the first is more interesting, and I think it has to do with a curious child’s first sense of power) not because I regret killing them in either instance but the way in which I did it as an adult and how it has affected me. It was the satisfaction of revenge and of not quite viewing slugs as living organisms deserving if not compassion, at least understanding of what they are.

I decided to learn more about gastropods. They are hermaphrodites, that is, each individual is both male and female and they can “choose” which individual is male or female with each mating, using their slime trails to help find the next mate (which also makes them susceptible to predators, like birds, frogs, snakes, toads, box turtles and people who follow the same trails.) Slugs have a long and complex evolutionary history of the same body type (shell-less “foot”) evolving separately from shell bearing ancestors at separate times. In other words, that shell-less body design has worked so well that various families are not even closely related to one another in spite of similar body forms. And like so many of our ecological problems, most crop damaging species of slugs and snails are introduced from other countries while our native species play an important and mostly positive role in forest ecology. So I learned that our own species was responsible for my strawberry woes because we introduced them (however inadvertently).

I want to keep learning to do things consciously, even when it involves killing. After all, we do kill to live daily. Now why aren’t my geese and chickens helping? Maybe next year I should have ducks.

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Kate Kerivan
August 23, 2009