Wednesday, May 22, 2013

This Slug Walked into a Beer

It seems so idyllic to plant an organic vegetable garden in the spring and harvest your own produce for salads, spaghetti sauce, and gazpacho. Getting in touch with the earth, feeling the warm, gritty soil between your fingers, inhaling the green earthy scent of growing things feels almost like paradise. Which is why I forget to weed and water the garden in the mornings, especially when it's raining. I'm letting nature take care of itself, right? It was working for me until my husband asked our teenage daughter to harvest some lettuce for a salad. She returned empty-handed within minutes, complaining that there were slugs all over the lettuce leaves. Slugs are not idyllic. I was unable to restrain a comment about the extra protein slugs would provide in the salad, particularly when steamed and dipped in a garlic butter sauce, but thought did make my stomach tremble. After using her smart, teenage brain, my daughter decided to cope with the slug problem using chopsticks. The sight of her heading out to the backyard to dislodge slugs from our salad with a pair of chopsticks stirred both me and my husband into action. True to form, my husband intended to harvest the lettuce himself. I, being an incurable planner, chose to tackle the problem armed with an old, plastic bowl and a bottle of beer. Everyone knows that slugs love beer. The sight of the slug perched on the underside of a lettuce leaf was impressive. I didn't think lettuce leaves would be strong enough to hold a slug. I wanted to surmise that lettuce is stronger than I thought, but I decided it was more likely the strength of the slug slime that kept the beast sticking to the plant. I shook it off and my husband harvested the salad, while I buried the bowl and poured in the beer. My daughter, not begin legally old enough to use alcoholic beverages as pesticide in an organic garden, simply watched. Did it work? Being afflicted with a cold, I didn't check my slug trap until two days later. Okay, so I was also afflicted with nausea at the thought of retrieving a bowl filled with drowned slugs. Still, I found only one slug floating in the bowl muddy beer. I tossed the contents of the bowl, slug and all, into the bushes nearby, reflecting gloomily on the appeal of bagged, pre-washed lettuce. Sometimes you can feel too close to your food source.

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