ONE of the hardest things about being an organic gardener is that sometimes you have to turn on the creatures with whom you share your territory. In my little domain, it is the slugs and snails who have risen up in their thousands, assaulting the plants nightly and eating them to the ground. They must be quelled, or killed, or banished... or something. And the sad thing is that they are quite beautiful creatures, in their way. Snails are sweet, with their questing little tentacles and their houses on their backs, while the slug - so rotundly Rubensesque while at rest - can become a stick and sinuous being when gliding along at full stretch.
Still, precious plants must be protected from being rasped to death by the multi-toothed radulae (or mouth parts) of these characters - no matter how endearing they can be. So, recently I turned my back garden into a laboratory of sorts - and a grisly one at that - trying every possible "green" method to eradicate, trap, blockade or poison the slimy critters.
Last autumn I acquired a young, very shy hedgehog. Each time he appears, his prickly girth has doubled: he must be hoovering up slugs and snails by the score, but I can honestly say that - although he is a charming chap - he has not made a whit of real difference to the gastropod problem here. Other helpful, mollusc-eaters - some are not suited to this garden, but might be to yours - are ducks, hens, wild birds, loads, frogs and ground beetles.
And so to beer: slugs and snails adore it, drinking deeply from containers sunk in the ground and dying an alcohol-soused death. Fine. Except that while carrying out my recent experiments I noted that the pub" was filled with small, stiff slugs in the morning, all infants and adolescents - no big fellows. Then, one evening I saw two large adults drinking and leaving the beer fest - perhaps to lie down in a damp place until they recovered. An improved trap (mineral water bottle: top cut off at the shoulders and inverted funnel-like into the topless bottle) was more successful. Yeast, sugar and water can be used instead of beer, but it is not as popular, attracting fewer drinkers.
There is much talk on the Internet about feeding oat-bran to slugs: it is supposed to swell up and rupture their innards (not for the squeamish). Because it may have the same effect on birds, it must be hidden under an upturned flower pot with a hole in the side, or in a trap. In the latter, it certainly works, although there are few takers; and while many slugs (but no snails) browse greedily under the flower pot, they don't stick around to die - so it's possible that some survive.
The Internet also advised spraying slugs with a half-and-half mixture of vinegar and water, or ammonia and water. The vinegar treatment had such a horrendous effect on my victims - some of whom recovered enough to slime away after hours of agony - that I couldn't face the ammonia trick.
I've also tried barriers, around special plants, of substances that are supposed to be harmful or uncomfortable when a slug or snail nudges its big, oozy foot at them. Hair clippings, soot, egg-shells, gravel, grit and coarse sand have all met with little or no success: they are washed or blown away by the weather, or ignored by the hungry culprits. In America, diatomaceous earth (ground-up diatoms: minuscule flinty algae) is recommended, as is copper foil or banding, which delivers a slight but unpleasant shock to slimy intruders.
At the end of the day - literally, at about 11 o'clock - the best way to protect your plants is to go out with a torch and either hand-pick" the beasts or snip them in two with a scissors. At night they are blubbering around in their droves and can be picked off easily. Any sentimental feelings you might have been harbouring will quickly be dispelled when you see how readily fresh recruits are drawn to feast on the slain carcasses of their brethren.
On a "good" night a harvest of 50 or 100 is the work of just 10 minutes. Which is all very well - except that a square metre of garden can easily support a slug population of 200. And that means that my back garden is home to 92,000 happy slugs (which is about three miles of tentacle-to-tail slug). So, a week-long concentrated campaign, which might reduce their number by 1,000, means I only have 91,000 more to deal with.
At times. it's best to know you're beat, and give in gracefully. After all, in the great scheme of things, slugs do serve a purpose: they eat up a certain amount of decaying vegetation and they pollinate the peculiar, ground-level, vase-shaped flowers of aspidistras, that Cinderella of plants.
If you have useful slug and snail observations, or successful defences (tried and tested, please), write to me, or e-mail me at: powers.iol.ie. We will return to this subject again.