COLUMNIST: Kelly Ireland
I HATED them.
So it was a bit of a revelation for me to hear someone praising them recently.
It was Alan Carter, author of 'A Food Forest In Your Garden’, that first brought to my attention that they aren’t all bad. He has probably the oldest food forest in Scotland, having started work on it over 25 years ago, so he knows what he is talking about. He has little slug habitats set up in his garden which he regularly checks. When he finds a cache of them, he gently moves them into a compost bin, where they can munch away on decaying matter to their heart's content.
This is permaculture. I have heard the phrase “The problem is the solution” many times in relation to slugs, followed by the snappy reply, “You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficit problem!”. And while this may be true, it isn’t actually helpful to anyone who has slugs but can’t keep ducks.
I have ducks, but not enough that would have been able to keep on top of last year’s slug problem.
Then this morning I was listening to a podcast with someone who considers himself a beetle farmer. Super weird but okay, I thought. Turns out that beetles EAT slugs. I am wondering how I have been gardening for almost 25 years and have not figured this out for myself.
Embarrassing.
As it turns out, I came across a bunch of beetles only yesterday (collective noun is, disappointingly, “a swarm”). I was moving some very decomposed silage and there they were! And not a slug to be seen… curious.
So I am now going to adopt the mentality that slugs are here to serve an important part of our smallholding ecosystem. They are NOT to be hated or harmed (to my shame I have murdered a few in years gone by with beer traps).
I, too, am going to become a beetle farmer.
It turns out that slugs are actually food for a heap of things including centipedes, mice, voles, and even baby grass snakes. Being in Scotland, we don’t have grass snakes but we do have slow worms.
I have a soft spot for slow worms and wish we had more of them. Their Gaelic name is Nathair-Chaltainn which means hazel snake. We have ancient hazelwood here, so I am always hopeful I will see them. As it happens, I have only possibly glimpsed one once, when I accidentally disturbed it in an old hay bale.
If having more slugs means having more slow worms then I can accept them. If they could just leave me a few brassicas I’d be grateful.
My plan going forward, should we have a slugaggedom like last year, is to relocate them all to the compost heap - far, far away from the vegetable beds in the hope that they find this more appealing.
I have done some reading in order to understand my former nemesis a little better. This is what I have discovered:
There are around twenty species of slug in Scotland.
They evolved from snails (which we do not have many of at all here).
They prefer decaying matter over alive, so a tidy garden will suffer more as there isn’t anything decaying for them to feast on.
They also have some pretty cool names: Balkan Three Banded, Sowerby’s Keeled, Green Cellar, and Budapest Keeled are just a few. Some don’t even eat vegetation. The Ear Shelled slug eats earthworms. Not cool. I’ll be making an effort to try and I.D. whatever I come across so I can better understand their needs and rehome them accordingly.
Will it work? Will I actually be able to make friends with these slimy little fellas? I hope so, and although it has taken me a long time to realise it, I have accepted that slugs are actually a necessary part of the complicated and diverse ecosystem we have.
References: Alan Carter, ‘A Food Forest In Your Garden’
Kelly Ireland is a keen gardener living with her partner on an off-grid smallholding in the North East of Scotland. After ten years, the house is finished and it is now time to concentrate on the garden. Kelly completed her Permaculture Design Certificate in 2022 and is using this to develop the new gardens around their home.
Keep up with her garden on Instagram at @growingseasons_.