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Newspaper Archive of
Shelton Mason County Journal
Shelton, Washington
August 13, 2020     Shelton Mason County Journal
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August 13, 2020
 
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HABSTINE In defense of slug tea arstine Island gardeners have a com— mon lament: slugs are the scourge of the land. Every one of us has found a plant re- duced to a lacquered rebuilt her garden on a foundation of scratchy landscape fabric, figuring the slugs wouldn’t cross its forbidding tex- ture. It’s a lot pret- tier than the card- stump or stick figure board I use to sup— shredded as if by a ‘ By ALEX press the weeds that 12-gauge snotgun FETHIERE give slugs cover. blast. Without slugs, we It’s small com— fort that animals eat them, because most would rather not. Tthe banana slug’s slime is numbing, and the black slug’s slime is so thick that Swedes have used itto grease wooden wagon axles since the 18th century. Slime aside, slugs are a favorite food of garter snakes. Many ducks gobble them up, and one permaculture farmer uses carrion to lure crows, who then make dessert of his slugs. Imagine, farmers luring crows! , Organic farmers might only use baits if they also use nonchemical methods of slug control. Often this means roaming the gardens at dusk with scissors, which not only reduces slugs but feeds those that remain. The next night one might be able to return to the same spot and kill the slug feeding on last night’s sacri- fice my record is four. One Harstine gardener How it Works: PICKING UP ITEMS: would be inundated with wood. In addition to bac- teria that break down tough plant fibers, slug guts contain over 3,000 enzymes that pro— cess our abundant forest litter ' into waste that is much easier for bacteria and fungi to use. Replenishing microorganisms is essential, since there are more of them in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on earth. Such is the balance that our native banana slug helped maintain before the arrival of the Euro- pean black slug, which exag- gerates the process to distur- bance. Soil health and texture, or tilth, is partially dependent on slugs. If they’re so good for soil, why not steward the process? Just as composting aims to ac- celerate the production of hu- mus (the organic component of soil), one should be able to enhance the diversity of soil life using slugs, right? Fertilizing was not the r. BRARY Ta keout original aim of Maria Thun and Rudolf Steiner when they brewed slug tea. Their intent was to repel slugs from crops. Steiner founded biodynamics, the ancestor of regenerative farming, in 1924. Among other practices it directed agronomy according to the astrological calendar — for example, the date of this publication is ide- al for planting. Notwithstand- ing its woo—woo trappings, biodynamics has been adopted by wine growers from the Wil- lamette to Chile to Bordeaux. Thun gathers 50 to 60 slugs when the moon is in Cancer and leaves them to rot in wa- ter. When the moon is in Can- cer again four weeks later, she strains out the solids to spray crops with the viscous liquid. Then she catches more slugs to repeat the process. Slug tea sounds worse than it is. After 30 days it smells no worse than a nitrogen-rich fer- tilizer, and if the buckets are left in the sun they will grow a bumper crop of algae that di- minishes that fragrance, pre- sumably by consuming some of the nutrients. Strained, it makes a spray that has notice- ably diminished slug attacks on my crops, but it' must be_ reapplied periodically and works best in conjunction with other measures like wood ash and ground eggshells. Its con- sistency lacquers other repel- lents onto the leaves without affecting growth. The rich crimson color on the bucket walls, though absent in the Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020 Shelton-Mason County Journal - Page A—9 Slug tea partially consumed by algae looks like a fertilizer as well as a repellent. Journal photo by Alex Fethiere liquid, briefly appeared in the stem of a pea plant after sev- eral applications. Though you have only a three—day window before the moon moves into Leo, in my experience appli- cations in other phases seem just as effective. Spraying or “peppering” unwanted lifeforms with ex- tracts of themselves doesn’t stop at slugs. Peppering is a process of sprinkling an area with the burnt remains of whatever one wishes to exclude. The production and application of peppers is gov- erned by the stars, whether I it’s weeds (seeds), insects, or mice (skin). The cat is far bet- ter at mouse peppering than I’ll ever be, and he actually enjoys it. 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