Gardening in Eden by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II

Author:Arthur T. Vanderbilt II
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

But not everything that happens at night can be blamed on raccoons. There are still enough inexplicable events so that the wise gardener confines gardening expeditions to the safe hours between dawn and dusk. The rest is better left to the gangs.

IV

SOME OF THE GANGS can play pretty rough, and they don’t play fair.

How hard is it to go to the nursery, buy a flat or two of marigolds, plant them in the well-prepared soil of a sunny bed, water them, and sit back to enjoy them for the rest of the season? Marigolds have always been a favorite of mine, and I started out with them years ago. Was that asking too much? Gardening doesn’t get much simpler; any gas station can pull it off with flair.

For a week the marigolds perform as expected, but then, though still blooming merrily, they don’t seem to be growing. No new leaves, no new buds. A shot of Miracle-Gro should fix that up, you think. But it doesn’t. They still look weak, stunted. Was there, you wonder in a haze of inexperience, something wrong with those particular flats? Back to the nursery, buy some more, throw out the first crop, and plant the next. Within a week or two, you encounter the same results. And then one fine day you take a close look at the pitiful plants and see it, a sniveling slug on the underside of a leaf. It’s been chewing the leaves to shreds, you can see that now, snapping the stems, snipping the flowers, sucking out their lifeblood. In your anger, you momentarily put aside your revulsion and pull off that hideous little hunk of snot, stomp it on the driveway, annihilate it beyond recognition, try to wipe its mucus trail from your fingers, and go back to make sure it didn’t have any colleagues waiting around for it. Colleagues? Now that you know what you’re looking for, it’s like a scene straight out of West Side Story, where someone whistles and a gang materializes out of every doorway and alley, ready to rumble. They’re on every marigold.

Sink a tuna can into the soil, your gardening friends advise you, fill it with beer, and the slugs will drop by for a drink after work and drown. Put out a grapefruit rind, others say, and pick it up in the morning to find it covered with them. No, no, eggshells, crushed eggshells, they’re the ticket; spread them around the plants, since the slugs can’t stand crawling over them, it must tickle their bellies. Sprinkle just a touch of salt on them and they dissolve, pffff! Copper strips laid around the plants will give them a nasty electric jolt as they slime over them. Pick them off in the evening or early morning and drop them into a can filled with Clorox or Wisk.

Each form of capital punishment works, but the slugs are working faster, each producing some five hundred slug eggs. So unless you have nothing else to do

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