Confessions of a Failed Slug Killer

Slugs and the Meaning of Life

Arion rufus. Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

I don’t know where you live, but I live in the Pacific Northwest. It rains. A lot. Not only do I think it rains a lot, but everyone who lives here and likes living here wants me to tell you that it rains a lot. Because it does … except when it doesn’t.

And, little known secret — that’s why we’re here. (But forget I told you.)

Which brings me to slugs.

These cute little mucus muffins seem to find our winter, our spring, our summer, and our fall rain, marine fog, and wetness a heady, alluring drink — which they also want to share with us. I mean, why else would they congregate on our front steps and on our walkways, and climb to the top of our plants so we can better see them?

Let’s also not forget their clear trust of us in distress — boldly marking our plants’ leaves with morse-code patterns to signal us … SOS … SOS. I always respond quickly— don’t you?

I once interned in a botanical garden where we were charged, among other things, with killing nonnative slugs on sight. Wait. I could have that wrong — it could have been all slugs. I should probably check because I like to be accurate, but then they’d find out what I’m about to tell you. I’ll think about following through on this — I’ll let you know by the end of this essay what I’ve decided.

Back to the story.

Have you ever killed a slug? I mean, really killed a slug. I don’t mean did you you serve it beer and let it have a final beer-guzzling hurrah in a swimming pool with all of its buddies late into the night. I mean did you kill it in cold blood knowing the moment you acted that that slug …was toast … joined the church triumphant… or was pushing up daisies … instead of eating your daisies? Did you? Have you? Will you again?

I also don’t mean did you catch it and put it into your compost heap figuring it was up to the slug if he lived or died. If you did, what does this say about you anyway? Both too weak to kill him and not nice enough to offer him a full spread of fresh tomato, cucumber, and lettuce salad from your garden?

What other alternatives am I missing here? Throwing slugs? Maybe. I’ve never thrown a slug. Snails? Yes. I’ve skipped them across the pavement (toward the neighbors) and if in the future I, too, sink like a skipped stone in the River Styx instead of finding my way to Heaven I guess I’ll deserve it.

If you’re wondering, I don’t live on that street anymore — which is probably better for the neighbors anyway, as I also sent all my giant, creepy, mechanical, speed-walking house spiders their way.

But, to be fair to myself, I’m fairly sure most of those eight-legged robots of death never made it there. Based on how big the spiders sometimes were in my house, I am convinced the same ones always came back. Life does that, right? It keeps sending you things until you truly figure out what to do with them.

But I digress.

Let me step back a moment. As you may have guessed this has all been a bit of a pitter patter around how I was instructed to kill slugs — at the botanical garden, which shall not be named, as I’m sure their insurers will not be happy to know someone like me — who was totally unreliable when it came to killing slugs — was ever given a job there.

There’s pretty much nothing else I have ever been considered unreliable about. I will either do what I am asked to do or I will ask questions to learn how to do it — or I will admit that I don’t have the skills to do it or that I won’t do something, if it ethically bothers me. I will do things incorrectly but never intentionally. With me, you usually get exactly what you expect.

But, when it came to killing slugs I was absolutely, nearly 100 percent unreliable.

Yes, that was more dodging, even if it brings us further along to what I need to tell you. But, really, has anyone ever demonstrated to you how to kill a slug? Yes? No?

Well, for me personally it was unpleasantly memorable, and it went something like this:

1. The charismatic and charming garden curator, whom I admire and respect immensely, spies a slug.
2. He speaks passionately to us interns about how important it is to kill slugs.
3. He grabs a hori hori, which is a fancy name for a soil knife. (Hori means “to dig” in Japanese, and saying it twice reportedly is intended to mimic the sound of digging. It’s otomonopeia — another example would be saying the happy slug who ate your prized dahlias probably had a few burpy burps afterward.)
4. He uses the blade of the hori hori to cut the slug in two (not lengthwise — mind you — they are not cucumbers).
5. The slug is now dead. The plants are safe! Hurrah!!
6. He grins, perhaps trying to make the whole experience more pleasant. (The curator grins a lot — he’s one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met.)
7. Glitzy garden partying ensues — think lights, wine, and stimulating conversation (which actually means you’re telling all your garden friends about why your cool plants are better than their cool plants, which all of you are probably about three days or three months away from killing, too.).
8. The end.

Except that really wasn’t how it went for me.

At the end of the demonstration, I was about speechless. I had a weird feeling in my gut for which my brain was unable to choose any words to accurately describe. What did come out was probably something like “OK,” but I more likely made a nervous joke or grimaced, while trying to be polite.

At the time, I really felt there were worse problems. I mean, killing a slug this way means:

1. You have blood on your hands — even if not actually on your hands. Slug blood is greenish, by the way, and it really is blood;
2. You have actual slime on your blade …Ew! … this blade, which is then supposed to be resheathed at your waist, on your person, maybe even touching you; and
3. You have not one, but two pieces of dead, oozing, slimy slug to deal with! And these pieces can no longer crawl away on their own. (That might have been one of my slug control methods. Might.) So now you have to pick them up. In the botanical garden. (Or in your yard.) So it looks nice. Yep.

Yes, maybe you could use your hori hori to flip the evidence behind a tree or under a shrub, or — better yet — toward the neighbors, but … you will still have to deal with it. And this will surely result in more of that slug-elixir-of-life on your blade.

In sharing this, you’ll note I’m not doing so on some gardening page. Why? Because for all of the horticultural and design education and experience I did obtain (thank you, incredible mentors) I think I have clearly established that I am not a slug-killing expert. I (intentionally) didn’t have a lot of practice.

I have killed one slug on my own using this method, and I estimate maybe two more under duress — which basically means the poor slugs had the unfortunate timing to have crossed my work area right in front of the botanical garden curator or the other intern, who, suffice to say, had no trouble at all following the slug-killing directions. Small wonder that I can’t remember for certain which slugs I was supposed to kill, right?

So what does this little jaunt into the world of slugs have to do with life? Well, it so happens that besides feeling (quite) a bit squeamish about killing a lifeform as large as a slug anyway, it so happens that I had become a mother about a year before I had left the tech industry and subsequently retrained as a landscape designer. And becoming a mother taught me a lot of things.

One of the first major lessons I never saw coming was that when you create life it can be very hard to unsee your own connection to creating death. I won’t go as far to say that I no longer kill mosquitoes (I do), but after I was a mother, any time my hand instinctively went out to smack a bug on my arm I cringed each time I was successful … and eventually mostly stopped (…except for mosquitoes).

I realized that my response to bugs (on my body) had been following more of a shoot-them-and-ask-questions-later policy, which I fundamentally do not believe in in any other area of my life, rather than a hi-how-ya-doing?-you-really-don’t-belong-on-my-arm-leg-neck-head-so-let’s-both-decide-what-should-happen-next policy. Becoming a mother made me see life in a different way.

I had already been setting spiders free long before my son’s birth, but now I do so with greater intention. I apologize when they land badly when I toss them out of a cup. The scary looking ones might spend a little more time in jar or cup jail before I take them outside, but they are always released. (Yes, I know they come back, especially when it’s dry inside and wet outside, but humor me here, let me be.)

This is really not an essay intended to sway you to not kill slugs or creepy crawlies that decide to co-habitate with you or your garden. It’s actually quite simple. The curator was right. Kill nonnative slugs in the same way that invasive plants (noxious weeds) should also be removed — I can say this confidently as plants don’t have heart beats. (No, stop Googling for that!! Because what I said isn’t exactly true.) Rather, I am wondering what you think about all this.

A great meme has been going around on Facebook in the last couple years that said something along the lines of if your plants are not being eaten by bugs then your garden is not part of the ecosystem. The designer in me — she craves order, beauty, soft perfection of textures and colors in the landscape, peaceful bird chirps, and spider webs covered in dew — immediately met for brain coffee with the mother and ecologist in me — they are patient, willing to observe, and help living things be while they also love high-pitched squeals of excitement, finger painted legs and toes, and even lanky, silly puppies destroying plants— and swiftly agreed that being interconnected was far better for design, too.

Chemicals don’t create perfect beauty. I’d much rather have some garden tatter and acceptance — I mean, I can have a party and the aphids can have a party, too, now and again.

As I move through life I understand even more deeply with each experience why growing isn’t about perfection, why success looks more like humility, and why if I am trying to get somewhere versus being present where I am I’ll never truly make it.

If you’re curious, I decided to message the curator. He said I was only supposed to kill nonnative slugs. That was a relief, as I at least partly remembered that being the point. I own up to the rest.

I’m still not sure if I can ever kill them, even with these good reasons, but it’s OK — because I have faith I may still grow and change in this area. I also know I am not meant to carry the load for all causes. I save my energy for the ones I am really meant to lead, by which I mean to serve. I’m practicing that more and more, too.

If protecting ephemerals and tender plants from slugs is your thing — I’m grateful because I can enjoy them when I visit your garden. Until I get the gumption to kill slugs myself, I’ll stick to hellebores and peonies, upon which the mucus muffins also prefer to gaze rather than graze.

In my new realm — a mix of crows, flickers, California scrub jays, robins, juncos, chickadees, an insanely charming son, and a marauding working line German Shepherd puppy — somebody will take care of the snails and slugs for me … and even the perfectly good garden plants I love, for that matter.

In the meantime, I will ever continue practicing being the person I want to be while increasing my gratitude for my failures.

There’s a lot of things I’m not meant to do very well at all — don’t ever ask me to paint neat lines down the center of highways or dock a spaceship. I’m pretty sure someone else will do a far better job than me. When it comes to killing slugs, you know where I will be … right here telling stories. If you want some real slug control advice, this might help.