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"I have need of the sky. I have business with the grasses. I will up and away at the break of day to where the hawk is wheeling lone and high and where the clouds drift by."   - Richard Hovey, 1894-1961

Monday, March 24, 2008

The Great Easter Slug Massacre

I had a lovely weekend. I made two loaves of sourdough bread (with a bread machine), one pumpkin pie, a roasted chicken, matzoh ball soup, and many s'mores...made with Peeps roasted over an open fire. On Saturday, to celebrate the coming of spring, we had a fire in our fire pit in the back yard, for which several friends and neighbors joined us. At Walgreens on Thursday, I had the sick and brilliant idea to roast Peeps for s'mores. I have to say it worked really well. The sugar caramelized leaving a crispy outside and a melty, hot inside, perfect for sticking a piece of chocolate in before smushing (this is a technical term) the top graham cracker on. I'm not a huge Peeps fan, but for this they work really well. I hope to make this a tradition.

On Sunday, I worked in the garden all morning. I'd gone to the garden store the day before to pick up a few seedlings - strawberries, spinach and lettace. (The spinach and lettace seeds I planted last month didn't sprout. So now, I'm starting them in a seed bed. Wish me luck!) I prepared the bed for the strawberries and in doing so I discovered a veritable slug farm. The slugs were very happy under the oxalis. I started collecting them in a large glass vase. I admit it. I'm a wuss (another technical term). I can't squish slugs. A while later I found a few slugs under a brick I'd knocked over. So, I started checking the other bricks. Slugs love the undersides of bricks. Before long, I'd pulled up every carefully laid brick in the garden and had a disturbingly large number of slugs in the glass vase. They started crawling out so I filled the vase with water, hoping they'd drown. That didn't work. That simply made it easier for them to get to the top. Reaching desparation, I poured a bunch of table salt in the vase. No more slugs made it out. Now I have a very disgusting vase of slimey salt water. Any takers?

Otherwise, the garden looks great. There are some fava beans that are taller than me. The plum tree has leafed out. The pear tree is blossoming. My daffodils have started blooming. The chard is yummy. The plants we put in last summer are huge and beautiful.

This is a picture from a month ago. Everything's at least 6-10 inches taller and the bed next to the fence is full of daffodils getting ready to bloom.

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