The Banana Slug Blether
by Patrick Vickery
I've never seen one myself, not in the flesh, but I've heard things like this about them:
The ones in my garden are usually brown, but I have seen murky yellow versions...seeing the first one was a revolting shock...they grow as long as ten inches, you know, huge, and smack their lips whenever I plant anything...some are bright yellow of course, with black spots...disgusting creatures...they look like ten day old bananas. Ugh, slimy...
An Ariolomax Dolichophalus - or a Banana slug to us gardeners - of which there are three types apparently, or so I'm told, quite common in some parts of America, particularly the Pacific North West. Yes, a Banana slug, so called on account of their bright yellow colours, hence the 'banana' bit, although they can be white, brown or even black, and some have spots as well. For years this creature was the unofficial mascot of the University of California (Santa Cruz campus), and there's a band named after them as well - the Banana Slug String Band - also from California. California must have a lot of them, I guess.
Now we only get the normal size slug in Scotland, of course, although I'm sure they can do as much damage once they get going. But despite being a nuisance in the garden, slugs are good for the eco-system, you know, very useful beasts and, of course, an essential component in the environmental scheme of things. Nevertheless you don't really want them in your garden, do you? No, no, certainly not. So what to do about them?
Here are a few innovative techniques which you may - or may not - already know.
Slugs like a drop of beer now and again, so put some beer out in a saucer, nighttime, something like that, and they will drink it and then drown in it. What a way to go, though? What a waste of beer?
Creosote. Another tried and tested method (tried and tested by me, anyway). If you have raised beds, as I do, give the wood a liberal creosote on a regular basis. Guaranteed to deter slugs, this method, no doubt about it, but unfortunately guaranteed to kill off your plants as well if you're a bit slap dash with the painting. Not one of my best ideas, that one. Tried once and never again.
Then there's the electric fence method, deters even the most determined of slugs, expensive, but not unheard of. Important to have a qualified electrician to do the installation, otherwise it could be lethal.
You can pick them off by hand, of course, by torchlight, a highly effective method this one, combined with the idea of natural pest control, encourage natural predators such as hedgehogs, toads and birds into the garden to feed on the unwanted pests...that sort of thing, although I'm not too sure how this would work in the Pacific North West with the Banana slug. Personally I don't fancy the idea of handling multi-coloured slugs the size of a banana by torchlight. Ugh.
But if your livelihood depended on it and zero tolerance was the order of the day as far as slugs go then I've heard of one particular method that gives one hundred per cent protection. It was told to me by Vicky, a Gardener from New Mexico. She put down a trail of sawdust along the fence line that enclosed her garden, fashioned a shallow trench in the middle, filled it with rock salt and then added a wooden roof two inches off the ground to stop the rain washing the salt away. This worked extremely well and now she has a slug-free garden! A truly inventive - though possibly expensive - idea.
On a different note altogether (nothing to do with slugs) she told me how to keep gophers out of the garden as well. We don't have a gopher problem in Scotland at the moment of course, but worth bearing in mind should a misplaced gopher come visiting. Now gophers - for those of you who know little about them - are small burrowing creatures (a bit like moles really, but without the pointy nose) that live in a series of underground tunnels. They eat carrots, flowers, potatoes, in fact pretty much anything really and can ruin a perfectly good garden. They've been known to yank whole plants down into their burrows in one go! Fascinating to watch, apparently, as long as it's in somebody else's garden and not your own. Anyway, she came up with an inventive solution by digging a two foot deep 'gopher trench' around the garden perimeter.
Why?
Well - thinking like a gopher - she decided that if they dug in the general direction of her garden and hit light this would cause them to change direction. She was right too. It worked. Another inventive solution.
The things we do to protect our gardens, eh?
(Patrick Vickery. Copyright 2006)
PS: Just recently, I have discovered a foolproof method for deterring slugs in the north of Scotland. If you e-mail me (put "Slugs" in the subject box), I'll tell you how.
Happy slug hunting!