The slugs are lushes | Ammi Midstokke

The fickle nature of May and June temperatures have the garden stunted, sad and anemic. Even the leaves of the zucchini look like nothing more than a fig leaf covering the tiniest cherub’s wee bits.

The peas are barely reaching for their trellises.

The pepper leaves have begun to slouch close to themselves, like coatless teenagers in a snowstorm.

The tomatoes are embarrassed by three premature blossoms.

A few eggplant bushes are issuing silent prayers to Saint Demetrius and Saint Euphrosynus, first that they may grow, and then that they may be incarnated into moussaka.

The carrots have poked their fringe tops from the soil, but refuse to grow beyond the few centimeters and have somehow managed to crowd themselves. They give the garden a pubescent appearance, and still manage to be more mature than the chard, which has waited weeks to emerge and then refused to be bothered with more.

Of the dozens of kohlrabi seeds planted, there are two pairs of leaves bobbing about.

And something with a very small mouth is munching on my tomatillos.

I had to bend over and get really close to see, because like everything else in the garden, the tomatillos are about an inch-and-a-half tall.

I roared like one of the three bears, “Who is eating my tomatillos!”

Upon further inspection, I discovered my squashes and peas were feeding a similar critter, or a close relative. I took a picture and uploaded it to AI.

“It appears either a toddler has taken a hole-punch to your plants, or the leaves have been systematically burned by a sociopathic gnome with a magnifying glass, or something is eating them.”

We have no toddlers and we’ve had no sun.

I tried to help Maude or Fraud or Fed, or whatever AI’s name is, by being more specific. It asked for my house address and whether I’d like an exterminator dropped in by drone that minute.

I declined, but noted the capability for the next time I’m in a precarious position and find myself out of toilet paper.

As I stomped and harrumphed through my garden, I imagined all the hungry caterpillars cowering behind flowers, waiting for my tantrum to be over.

Then, I recalled that I had seen a slug on the patio recently, and some glittery evidence of their explorations on my cedar siding.

There can be nothing more abrasive to a slug than crawling around on rough cut wood, which meant they’d have no problem navigating my wood-chip pathways.

I turned over every hiding place I could think of and found nothing.

That night, I sent my husband out after dark with a flashlight, then again before the sun rose in the morning. Nothing.

The slugs must be brighter than they look.

I have learned that garden vermin are often far smarter than gardeners – or at least this gardener – and so I began to research the gastropod to understand how its brain worked, that I might outsmart it.

For most vermin, building false-front bordellos and taverns seems to work.

This did not work for ground squirrels, who used them to procreate and dine, and never once seemed bothered by any of the barbarous traps, gases, smoke, flame or flood I unleashed upon them like an angry god.

Maybe they were Old Testament ground squirrels and hardened to calamity.

Much to my dismay, I learned that slugs have brains, can form memories and make associations about stuff like what “gave them an upset stomach.”

Most concerning is that Chet or Chat or Rat doles out information to me as if it were authoring a children’s book, complete with simple drawings.

Any day now, Amazon will try to sell me antacids for my presumed pet snail farm.

Because I don’t want the whole world to know my embarrassing search history on gardening gaffs, I grabbed a book off my shelf to look up what I really needed to understand.

Which is, obviously, how to kill the little buggers dead so I can put their tiny, severed heads on toothpick-stakes around the edge of my planter boxes.

It would seem that slugs are the frat boys of garden riffraff, and so I fashioned several small swimming pools filled with beer and turned my garden into the promise of a party to remember.

The only problem was, I didn’t have real beer, just the non-alcoholic stuff. I figured they wouldn’t notice.

I was wrong, and am once again the laughing stock of vegetable patch vermin.

My slugs appear to be lushes and will sacrifice themselves only for real beer.

Thankfully, all my fury-in-the-fennel-patch seemed to scare them into scarcity, and the tomatillos have grown taller than the slugs can reach.

I imagine the slugs will soon be settling in the condos they make out of my kohlrabi, where I may just install regular swimming pools, and tiny lounge chairs, and perhaps a tiki bar.

If my garden is going to house a population of invertebrates, I will gentrify the place until they are priced out of the market and are replaced by the more affluent insects, like monarch butterflies and praying mantis.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.