WALKING THE ROWS

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An Interesting Case

By visiting the garden regularly you are less likely to encounter rude surprises. I got a call one Saturday from a woman who was practically hysterical. "Something is eating my whole garden!" she exclaimed. "Please, can you come and tell me what to do." If she had something that was eating her whole garden, that would be news. My garden has been visited by everything from flea beetles to moose and none of them ate everything. The biggest problem with moose, by the way, is the size of their feet. Fortunately they have always been passing through because if they wandered around a little they would do a lot of damage.

Before grabbing my camera to photograph the phenomenon I thought it best to calm her down and get a little more information. What were they eating? Everything! Maybe she planted only the things woodchucks like to eat? It had to be an animal because insects are very plant-specific.

Finally I got this woman to tell me that it was on the asparagus, it was the size of her finger, yellow and fuzzy. I had to send her out to look at the culprit again. When she called the second time she told me that it didn't have legs. I thought we were getting close but the fuzzy bit still had me baffled. A slug, fuzzy? She did say fuzzy, not slimy.

I told her she could stick a sharp object like the point of a knife into them if she wanted to do battle right then and there. But that they probably wouldn't actually wipe out any of her crops, even the asparagus. Long-term, she needed to make the surface of her garden drier as well as the area around the garden.

Slugs don't eat much, not much of the garden that we like to eat anyway. They actually do more good than harm turning dead organic matter into plant nutrients But they can be a problem. They love to live in lettuce and cabbage plants, down in the lower portions where water collects. At one time I thought they ate tomatoes because I often found them inside holes in ripe tomatoes. With more frequent visits to the garden I learned that the slugs were actual ly getting into holes that crickets made in the fruit. Not that slugs won't eat a little of just about everything but their feeding is not the real problem. The real problem is that they are not pleasant to come across in the garden, and less pleasant to come across in the kitchen, and you really don't want to see them in the dining room. When I was selling lettuce and cabbage it became absolutely necessary for me to figure out a way to keep them out of these crops.

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