In Praise Of Slugs

In praise of slugs? An impossible subject. Maybe so, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and examine it further.

Look at it this way: Despite what the fish and game department likes us to believe about fishing, gardening is easily the No. 1 avocation in the Pacific Northwest. And anyone who digs in the earth probably ends up relating to slugs more often than any other wild animal in their lives. We may treat the local orca pods as wildlife celebrities, we may reinvent the spotted owl as our symbol of wildness, we may expend vast amounts of money, time and self-respect trying to get close enough to grab a salmon under the gills, but it is the slugs we know best. And most often. Slugs: our primary window into the heart of wilderness.

Or let's regard slugs as horticulturalist George Pinyuh does. He goes so far as to state that the mollusk be named the Washington state animal by simple virtue of its regional predominance. It seems a lot more grounded a choice than, say, wishful Connecticut choosing the sperm whale for its state totem. Pinyuh also observes that slugs serve an important part in our lives by providing an endless source of conversation: "If they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them."

Yes, let's acknowledge the place of slugs in our daily lives. Let's acknowledge that they are exponentially more accessible than orcas, owls, salmon and especially all the sperm whales in the state of Connecticut. Acknowledge them, certainly. But praise them? I start writing with the best of intentions and soon find myself breaking free from my most fervent ecological moorings, my words leaping onto the page all slippery-coated, overcome by that dominant image of slime. If you agree with me that the most memorable trait of the "Alien" monster was the slime dribbling from every pore in its body, then you may also agree with me that slime, in the archetypal sense, evokes a nearly pathological undertone of sickness and death. Despite the fact that the slugs in our gardens may be enjoying exceedingly good health, still the image we perceive is nothing but of sickness and dying.

It doesn't make sense because having lots of slugs is a sure sign that the soil is alive and healthy, capable of holding the essential moisture that both slugs and vegetables need in order to grow. But let's also face it. When the slug population is healthy, the garden simply feels sick. Slugs are like the tax man come to get their fair share of the local greenery. By the way, did you know that tests have concluded that slugs prefer the color green over all others? Red is their second-favorite color.

I bring up the subject of slugs among my neighbors and soon prove George Pinyuh correct. The conversation is a never-ending tale that soon turns into a contest about local knowledge. Each speaker assures the others that he or she alone knows what slugs like best. One insists on pansies, but then admits that she's got an awful lot of pansies. Bearded irises, dahlias, delphiniums, tarragon; all of it slug fare. Someone once spotted a banana slug 5 feet up a magnolia tree munching on the flower heads. The list starts growing. And the vegetables? Lettuce, cabbage, broccoli. Many a morning in June I've come upon slugs 3 feet up my asparagus plants, rocking back and forth in the feathery foliage like a sailor relaxing in a hammock.

And then there's marigolds. Everyone is smiling now, in sober recognition that yes, that's it, we all agree, slugs will go more out of their way to get at the marigolds than any other plant in the garden. Maybe next summer I'll plant a special marigold bed for slugs, kind of like the horticultural equivalent of hanging sacrificial zincs on the underside of a yacht to keep the metal fittings from corroding. The slugs would congregate at their red and green marigold coffeehouse, leaving the rest of the garden to me. Sounds good, but I'll never do it.

One of my neighbors prefers to get rid of slugs with beer and recommends a brand called Meisterbrau because it's both cheap and yeasty. Another neighbor ventures out with a flashlight after dark and picks them off the plants one by one. That works fine for the several species of big slugs. But what about the little ones, like the pernicious gray garden slug that looks like a shmoo and grows no larger than a grain of rice? It hides deep in the soil and comes out only after dark to mow down all the seedlings. Or it eats the bean seeds before they ever even break the surface of the soil. This same neighbor tends to avoid their minimouthed destructiveness by first letting all his vegetables grow to a sufficiently robust size in 4-inch pots. It's a fine strategy for a small garden, and one meaningful manifestation of human/slug coexistence.

On that note, I attempt to change the course of our conversation by asking for some slug virtues. Unfortunately, it sounds eminently hollow to hear one neighbor generalize the issue by spouting off the homily about the essential place that any wild animal holds within the environment. Actually, every gardener I've ever met knows that fundamental ecological axiom. In other words, yes indeed, we all recognize that slugs clean up waste, that some species feed on aphids and caterpillars and that, in turn, they provide food for snakes, ducks and frogs. But simply knowing that isn't going to change the attitude of somebody who's just seen his string beans smart-bombed. I'm going to need something more specific than that if I ever hope to redeem them in the eyes of my gardener friends. As it is, such generalizations make me feel like I'm waving to the crowd from the spotted-owl float in the Aberdeen Fourth of July parade.

I feel firm in my desire to praise slugs, so I mention that, actually, I've never had slugs interested in my columbines. In fact, there are many, many flower species that slugs go out of their way to avoid. Peonies. No, none of us has ever seen a slug rasping on a peony. Daffodils, Jack's Ladders, lilies, bleeding hearts, lychnis, artemisia, sage, certain centaurea, pyrethrum, mint, artichokes. The slugs can fool you any time, even me. In fact, it would be quite easy to grow a beautiful and bountiful flower garden without ever again having to contend with slugs. Do it and you, too, may surprise yourself by praising those slug species that feed only on dead and decaying matter, thus providing an important sanitation function in the environment. But don't push your luck by clearing a plot for a vegetable garden.

If you do, then maybe you should also consider interspersing the crops with quack grass. Studies have shown that when this persistent weed is killed, it releases a chemical compound into the soil that is fatal to slugs. Plant quack grass? It sounds a bit like the military destroying a country in order to save it.

Everybody's laughing now, a sure sign that we all recognize that the slug population in Western Washington shares something profound with the human population. Left alone, neither population seems very willing to control its numbers. I've heard it said that the slug population can approach 72,000 per acre. In a way, it's too bad that escargot never caught on in this part of the world. There's probably more protein cruising across that acre than you're ever going to get from a similarly sized planting of vegetables. Myself, I can't get past the slime. If I could, I'd probably have bought one of those slug cookbooks years ago.

Speaking of which, I know a lot of people who will tell you with a straight face that, "except for fish and chicken," they are practicing vegetarians. Likewise, I kid myself into believing that I am a bona fide organic gardener, even though I sometimes rely on commercial slug bait. My imagination permits me to hold tight to this quasi-organic status because I always squirt the poison into pickle jar lids. I highly recommend that everybody else follow my example. I place the lids at strategic locations throughout the garden and not a drop ever touches the soil.

Well, that's not quite true. Have you ever watched a slug who's just eaten slug bait? I'm not sure I can describe it in a family magazine, so let me just say that the poor creature's insides are soon outside. The path of the slug's death journey is soon coated with a hard, sometimes bubbly, reflective super-coating of slime. Who could predict that a 2-inch long animal could possess so much slime? Or for that matter, who's willing to inform me what's really in that stuff the chemical companies call metaldehyde, and which just got spread the width and breadth of my garden rows. I got the message, and it's caused me to stop placing poison anywhere near the plants I feed my family. Take my word on it. Use beer instead. Or get one of those sharp-pointed, triangular-headed hoes. I use one all the time, and it zaps them very quickly.

I watch this dance of death unfold before my eyes and too often rationalize that it's the slug's own fault. I watched the population grow all through the spring and kidded myself that their season would peak as soon as the rains started to subside. But it's June now, and the slug season hasn't shown any sign of peaking yet, and therefore, ipso facto, it must be the slug's fault. I even followed my neighbor's advice and went out every night during April and May; picked them off the plants one by one and placed them in a large jar until the inside of the jar started to look like one of those pods from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Hundreds of slugs bottled up and discarded; and yet every night the same number returns to haunt both me and my flashlight. My daughters turn away from the jars as if there's a human limb embalmed within.

It makes me wonder. Is there even one gardener in Western Washington who doesn't scorn the lowly slug? If you are out there, and I imagine you must be, then why not write a letter to this magazine expounding what the rest of us have never been able to appreciate? But let's keep it genuine, folks. Write nothing overly cute because, really, isn't that tone just a clever way of expressing disdain? Nor do any of us want to hear your favorite slug recipe, unless, of course, you really do eat them. Now that would be some letter. And please, no slug jokes; no hilarious stories about the time your dog wolfed down a slug the size of a mortadella grazing through his Alpo. We'll print the best three. So let's hear it for slugs.

JIM NOLLMAN, DIRECTOR OF INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATIONS, INC. IS AUTHOR OF "DOLPHIN DREAMTIME," AND "SPIRITUAL ECOLOGY." HE LIVES IN SAN JUAN COUNTY. MARIAN WACHTER IS A SEATTLE TIMES NEWS ARTIST.