For Chinese, 2024 is the year of the dragon, for mammal lovers the year of the stoat and for birders the year of the house sparrow. Soon every year will be claimed by so many interest groups that assigning a year to an animal will become meaningless. But although 2024 is also half over, I still want to add another animal to the series. For me, this year is the year of the slug.
Oh, those slimy little slugs! They got to all my veggies in no time. And slugs were also often the topic of conversation. I received lots of helpful advice, especially after I also wrote about slugs on this site. Some of the advice was pretty extreme. It ranged from cutting them in half with pruning shears to crushing them with a sledgehammer. The least animal-unfriendly option seemed to me to put the slugs in the freezer overnight.
But often the snail was approached less aggressively: the animal was deterred with crushed eggshells, coffee grounds or table salt. And then there was the biological war using parasitic nematodes.
All control methods had one thing in common: they didn’t work. Even the nematodes were no match for supremacy. I had noticed that plants from the onion family – leeks, garlic and chives were not eaten by slugs. I wrote about that in the paper, and also about my proposed experiment to keep the snail out with a rampart of chopped chives. I received dozens of photos of slugs busy razing a clump of chives to the ground. Apparently, slug behavior can vary from place to place.
But now I have the solution: an acquaintance with a Surinamese in-law gave me the tip to use neem oil (pronounced: niem oil). Neem oil? Never heard of it. But it turns out that this oil does exist. The oil is pressed from the fruit of a tropical tree, Azadirachta indica. The oil is used, I learn on Wikipedia, as a medicine for skin ailments, as well as an insecticide in organic horticulture. The neem tree is the subject of biopiracy – the filing of patents on substances obtained from wild plants. How ignorant I am.
Neem oil is not available in our village, but on the Internet you can find plenty of it. You use the oil as follows: you pour a dash in a liter of water and add some green soap so that the oil flows better. With a plant sprayer you spray the oil on the plants threatened by slugs.
And I can tell you, dear reader: there hasn’t been a bite out of my basil and green beans since. The question remains whether they will soon be edible. Because the oil is not toxic but it does smell strongly of motor oil. I will let you know.
