Tag: slugs

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Woodlice, aubergines and empathy

This aubergine closely resembles the ones I write about below.

My daughter recently queried a statistic she read in a fundraising magazine: 17% of the Swiss population have been subject to racial discrimination. She wondered whether a more helpful statistic might be to know what proportion of the Swiss BAME population has been subject to racial discrimination, but as I pointed out to her, we tend to only really care about what happens to people when we can identify with them ourselves. If the charity in question wants to raise money from the average, probably white, Swiss person, it needs to articulate the problem from the perspective of the Swiss population as a whole.

I thought back to this discussion the other day when I was harvesting two small, sorry-looking aubergines. As previously mentioned, the slugs have had a bumper year in my garden, and these pathetic specimens were not spared. The slugs had eaten their way right through them, creating tunnels for the convenience of other insects looking for a home. I took out my knife and started to cut out the eaten parts in order to salvage what I could of the remaining flesh. I displaced a woodlouse from the first aubergine, but didn’t think much of it. When I cut into the second aubergine, however, I discovered a whole woodlouse family with a few tiny woodlice. I felt absolutely dreadful, I had not only destroyed their home but also broken up the family. I made a pathetic attempt to reunite them as I put the remains carefully in the compost heap.

I know this probably sounds absurd, but I identified strongly with the woodlouse mother and her care for her offspring. I realise that this is anthropomorphism taken to an extreme, but I’m a sensitive soul, and it’s how I felt.

Who is my neighbour?

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On being forced to share

The greatest success of my garden this year: pattypan squash.

When I was planning my vegetable garden for 2025, I knew that it would be no ordinary year. My father had just died, and my mother was going to need my support, which would mean being away from my garden for extended periods of time, so I decided to do things a little differently. I chose a less ambitious range of seeds and included varieties I hadn’t grown before, like pattypan squash, feeling that I had less to lose than usual. Little did I know at that point that life held even more disruption in store, including a move back to the UK to plan, meaning that the garden got even less attention this year than normal.

My lack of time and attention has had direct consequences on the harvest. I got a fraction of the figs, because, due to my failure to keep them under surveillance, birds took all the fruit from the top of the tree. Many of my tomato plants are only half tied-up and are drooping down under the weight of unripe fruit, which the slugs have been demolishing while still green. I have decided to find a redemptive way of viewing this situation. The birds of the air, who neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, have been fed, and I have been inadvertently loving my slimy enemies (Matthew 6:26, Matthew 5:44).

The pattypan squash, however, have been an enormous success – but I don’t really know what to do with them…

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Slugs, scissors and the denial of death

This lucky one escaped the slugs.

I shocked and horrified a colleague the other day by explaining that my approach to dealing with the overwhelming slug population in my garden was to snip them in half with scissors. Apparently, she will never look at me in the same way again. I admit that it does sound pretty horrible, perhaps she imagined me hounding the poor defenceless creatures and bloodthirstily relishing the moment of their demise? Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

As I tried to explain to my colleague, by then in a state of shock and not very receptive to reason, it’s surely more humane to kill them quickly than to drag out their demise using salt, poison or beer? What’s more, I leave their uncontaminated remains to be consumed by other members of the ecosystem (which are probably other slugs, given the fact that the remaining individuals are getting progressively bigger). And I do feel bad about it, it gets harder the bigger the slugs get, and it’s especially difficult when they raise up the front part of their body in an attempt to ‘look human’ and shame me into sparing them. At least I do generally apologise to them first (unless I am too angry about the damage they’ve just done), but when push comes to shove, it’s between them and my vegetables (and they’ve already had more than their fair share).

My daughter, a slug-sympathiser who NEVER lies to me, wound me up terribly the other day by pointing out that slugs had an emotional capacity similar to that of dolphins. After a few seconds of stunned silence, I came to my senses, and continued snipping.

I know there are other methods, I tried out elaborate plastic cones this year that claimed to prevent the entry of molluscs, but my slugs clearly hadn’t read the instructions. Other people collect their slugs and snails and deposit them miles away, to prevent them from returning – but is that kind? Deporting them to unknown territory where they will probably get picked off anyway? Plus, I’m not willing to spend my limited energy on that kind of shenanigans. You might ask where the hedgehogs are in all of this? Well, I saw a couple of them under the hedge earlier in the year, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I can’t exactly import new ones.

Why is slicing slugs so problematic? I think it comes down to a denial of death. Killing slugs in this very direct way makes me face the unpleasant fact that I am taking their life away, but it’s their life or the life of my vegetables, and by extension my life. Beyond my hobby gardening, many other organisms have to die for me to live –even if these are usually ‘only’ plants. You can argue that not all forms of life are equal, but the taking of one life to sustain another is just a fact of existence. Or maybe we can look at it the other way around, that life is given, relished and then offered up to another form of life. When my time comes, I look forward to feeding the mushrooms.