RE: Slugs

Claire-
I believe you could have this published! I particularly like your "vole
anger" as I can relate to it.  Several years ago my husband was somewhat
appalled that I (not quite his wife yet) could set out mouse traps in the
voles path to kill them.  That was what he said after I warned him not to
walk barefoot in the backyard, and he looked very sad when the first one was
killed and he came to tell me.  After the 8th one, and they had meantime
killed off his favorite plant- he started helping me reset the traps.

Ahhh, the great bonding experiences a garden can provide!

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-perennials@hort.net [o*@hort.net]On
Behalf Of ECPep@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 9:10 PM
To: perennials@hort.net
Subject: Re: Slugs


In a message dated 2/19/03 10:46:50 PM Eastern Standard Time,
abtrlife@earthlink.net writes:


> seems to damage the nervous system.' Unfortunately, they don't say how
> to come by caffeine - but they do say that 'a cup of instant coffee
> contains about 0.05 percent caffeine'."
>

There is an aspirin/caffeine combination sold OTC.  Walmart is one source.
Health food stores are better yet.  200mg. per tab of caffeine can be
purchased OTC and without filtering you save the slug a headache.  You can
filter out the caffeine on the kitchen counter if you want to go to all that
trouble.  It would seem to me that if caffeine was an efficacious agent for
slaying slugs, it would appear on the market.  It is cheap to produce and is
a common "booster" in many combined Rx formulas.  If it is a contact agent,
why would it be any more efficient than the salt shaker?  If you have to aim
and hit, any kitchen chemical would probably do the job.  The good old slug.
If we did not have slugs and Japanese beetles and aphids and voles, life
would be just too easy.  I have an all grey head and for all of the years
that I can remember, slugs have been destructive in the garden. A point to
remember is that you have a much larger brain than a slug so some of the
destruction is lack of planning on our part.  If you put a plant you like in
a place that the slug likes, you usually lose.

I used to think a bit about slugs and why we tried to kill them as adult
populations.  Thought that interrupting the breeding cycle would be more
humane.  Then I thought this does not work in higher life forms, humans for
instance so that was discarded.  The will to live is powerful in all life
forms (except very expensive plants).  Next I thought slugs were as deer,
increasing in numbers because of human intervention.  My mother, age 94,
tells me that picking slugs out of her father's garden and dropping them
into
kerosene was worth a penny a slug.  The intervention cause is probably not
the reason.  Slugs live and die in areas of less than one square yard, also
breed in that small area.  Dear old Mom also said ducks were employed in
cabbage fields to keep down the slugs.  Apparently in her youth, finding a
slug in a large head of cabbage was not uncommon.  You might want to think
about dining on duck.

Slugs have no real enemies except the toad.  Other slug eaters are not
really
into hunting slugs, just chance meetings for some snakes.   Birds do not
like
them.  So back to caffeine.  Very few legitimate chemicals kill slugs unless
a direct hit is achieved.  The common baits actually stun them.  The slug
dies from exposure.  If he is lucky enough to come to in the rain, he is
home
free.  I think the gardener will always battle slugs.     Unless the govt.
declares are war on slugs (rhymes with drugs) (when they will then prosper
even more) slugs don't even have bad press.  The worst thing they do that
aggravates the population is appear on a path in rainy weather and cause an
innocent to slip and fall from the slug's unfortunate body shape or rather
lack of body shape.

Therefore slugs are part of life as is acne, colds, houseflies, papercuts,
male pattern baldness, and the human love for anything with ingredients that
will kill us.

In the mountains where I live the soils are infected with non-pathogen
vectors: gravel, shale, pebbles, rocks, big rocks, etc.  I think that this
has an effect on slugs.  Not an immediate effect but a general environmental
effect as we do not have a lot of slug damage.  There are slugs but not
enough of them for me to become insanely angry as in deer anger or vole
anger.

As slugs have proven resistant to viral infections, nematodes, bacterial
disease, legal chemicals, do you think a minor chemical as caffeine will do
the trick?  If so, send private email to me and I will advise you how to
separate the caffeine from the the aspirin sold by most chain stores with
pharm depts.  Any college student can help with this as one of ours assured
me whilst entertaining us with his many (unknown to us) achievements.

Trusting that most of this will not be treated too seriously,

Claire Peplowski
NYS z4

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