JoAnne Rubin, age 12, of Westport, Connecticut, for her question:
In what category do garden slugs belong?
When we start our first organic garden, we are likely to classify the slugs as slimy little pests. From the human point of view, this is what they deserve. However, nowadays we strive for a more objective point of view. We know that every living thing has a role in the balanced ecology that we ourselves need to survive. So, naturally, we want to know the proper category for those slimy slugs and just what they are supposed to contribute to the big scheme of life on earth.
In India, people regard a certain breed of lazy cattle as sacred and permit them to devour their vegetables, even if the children must go hungry. Let's not follow this example by showing mercy to our garden slugs. If we want to save our vegetables, they must go.
Scientists classify the slugs in the soft bodied mollusk phylum, along with squids and snails, oysters and assorted shellfish. The slugs and snails, whelks and limps are subdivided into the mollusk class ^astropoda. The thousands of gastropods are sub divided into smaller families and genera and each has an individual species name. There are not many slugs and several of the largest, most decorative ones live in `he sea. The land slugs that plunder our gardens are in the family Limacidae, most of them in the genus Limax.
They are shell less snails that perform useful work in the wild by devouring dead and surplus vegetation. However, they much prefer a menu of our favorite vegetables and flowering plants. Slugs can travel twice as fast as snails and also hang from ropey threads of mucus to hoist themselves from the ground to the greenery. There is no sense in returning them to a nearby wild area. In a short while they can return to their preferred food and populate your garden, plus your neighbor's with their offspring.
It is not easy to destroy every slug in the garden. But if we study their habits and weakness, we can cope with most of them. Slugs have soft, slimy skins that cannot abide extreme heat or cold, dry air or gritty sand. We can protect the lettuces and such by spreading sand or wood ashes around their roots. Slugs feed at night, which hampers hunting. But during the day they hide in the soil or in moist holes. Place tiles, cabbage leaves or other suitable hideaways in likely places on the ground. Lift the traps in the morning and prod the slimy pests into a mixture of water and kerosene.
During the summer, we need a two fold attack to trap them and to make it hard for escapees to climb onto our plants. In winter, they go below and devour roots and come to the surface in early spring to devour the tender sprouts of our pet perennials. When slugs are a severe menace, in late fall we can remove the dirt from around the delphiniums and replace it with coarse sand. In spring, we replace the sand with composted soil and set out our sneaky slug traps.