Slimy diversity...

It’s been a while since I posted a tale from the grosser side of gardening, but I just can’t resist sharing this one with you…

Today, I gave Tom, one of our newest volunteers, the job of compost turning to add to his widening range of experiences in the food growing process. It’s a fine old job, seeing how fresh (or perhaps starting to rot) ingredients are miraculously transformed into more recognisable compost – a precious commodity on our sites. Today was the second turning and the life Tom found in there was incredible.

Now, some slugs in your compost bin is not a bad thing, per se. Slugs like to eat decaying plant material, aiding the decomposition process, and perhaps, while they are focused on that, their minds (if they have such a thing!) are not on our delicate and delectable salad leaves…However, the quantity we unearthed was something else!

Here they are all collected up in a 1 litre yoghurt pot. Whoever thought there could be so many shapes, colours and sizes in slug?

Why were there so many? Well, my theory has set upon the ‘soft’ nature of our volunteers and my apprentice at Allens Gardens. Hard-working? Certainly. Enthusiastic and wonderfully curious about all things to do with salad growing? For sure! But ruthless, they are not. On a site that abounds in slugs and snails, testament of which is the speed that our lettuces get devoured on planting, a certain harshness must be applied. But I can’t, and wouldn’t, enforce this. And so, along with the weeds and other plant debris, the slugs are slung into the compost heap. And there they live rather too happily. Having a few is fine. And the eggs that they lay in there should be killed off in the heat of the composting process. But the more there are, the more chance there is that some of these eggs might get spread over our sites in the resulting compost. A bit of a recipe for disaster, really. Turning the compost today was a good time then to adjust the balance, and this rather large pot of slugs went on a little trip down the road, to a place they were likely to do less damage…for this, they have apprentice Emma to thank for her intervention…

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