No Slugs in my Lettuce

I became a gardener in the rainy Northwest.  Slugs abound.  Banana slugs, round backed slugs, keel backed slugs, and those tiny little ones that spoil a perfectly good head of lettuce.  Slugs are so ubiquitous in the NW that the UCSanta Cruz mascot is a Banana Slug.  Slugs have been described on the Oregon State slug info site as “basically a stomach on one large foot”.  They are slimy and gross.  It is really hard for me to find anything likeable about them.

Slugs appear during those gray, drizzly days so common in the Northwest spring.  I have spent countless hours building beer traps, placing copper collars, doing death by salt, and hand-picking in the wee hours with a flashlight.  I’ve gone to considerable efforts, just for a head of lettuce without slug damage.  When my son found a tiny baby slug in a salad it put him off garden grown greens for weeks.

Fast forward to life in the Northeast.  With a week of cool, drizzly weather, reminiscent of back home, I noticed a few delicate slugs stretched out on paths as I walked through the arboretum.  Maybe snails venturing from their protective shells?  Suddenly it occurred to me - I’d been harvesting lettuce all week – with NO slugs. This is the Northeast!  My first season here I was so appreciative of those perfect slug free heads of lettuce.  How quickly one forgets and begins to take for granted the simple blessings of daily life.  Another lesson from the garden.

More food for thought – if you had to depend on your garden to put food on the table, how would your gardening change?  Just how much time would you spend on growing food that wasn’t perfectly suited to your climate?  I’m not suggesting monoculture, but the variety would be a little narrower.  No eggplants struggling to ripen in the temperate northwest, spinach bolting in the heat of the south, and artichokes squeaking by in the New England snows.   We’d be planting what grew reliably for our parents, and their parents before them.   But for me, gardening is a hobby. If  my experimental ‘crops’ fail, the market is a quick walk down the road.  So I can experiment, and have the fun of challenges.  For now.