KW-22 The war on slugs

and lots of gardening.

All agriculture, self sufficient vegetable growing, backyard gardening, balcony tomato raising or allotmenting is a process of replacing nature with the unnatural.

I thought I was going to write about how to erect a beanpole wigwam when there is only one of you, but it seems like I got carried away with slugs. An unpleasant image. if ever there was.

Persuading plants which do not want to grow in a certain place to grow there, and the reclassification of those which do as weeds. The best that we can hope to do is to create diverse and sustainable new habitats, but we should not try to convince ourselves that we are not exerting our human tool-grasping power in the destructive subsumation of the natural world into our unnatural, but productive one.

We don’t need to beat ourselves up too badly about it though, it can be done consciously and responsibly. Gardening with respect and humility is a good thing for the human, and the creation of aware humans, sensitive to their place in the panoply of All Things, minimising their destructive nature and placing themselves within the scope of Gaia is a good thing for the world.

Except slugs. Screw those disembodied feet, those disemfeeted toes of slime and destruction. We are at war with slugs. It’s a them or us fight to the end. An extinction level event for those spewtum filled gastropods, si vous plait. Bring it.

And we are winning. We have lost one lettuce and three optimistically early planted courgettes to the mucus bastards, and we intend to lose no more. For the squeamish amongst you, I will say that I get up early and remove them from the vegetable garden, relocating them to a better place.

For the more truthfully minded, the relocation is from this plane of existence to the next, via the sole of my massive, slug-soul crushing size 48s.

In the last few days, the average size of putrefying snail-evictees has shrunk from medium sized Havana to small hornéd train of tic tacs. I believe we are now smushing their young, and within the week they will be no more.

Spontaneous generation aside.

We do like ducks. The ones in the village are so chill, you can sit down next to them and have a chat. There is no zoom on this photo, and my phone camera tends to widescreen things a bit. I was sitting an arms length away from this little mallard triad, and they were totally unbothered.

In other news:

Last week, the bean wigwams went up and got planted. I think I filled the pumpkin patch, but that might have been the week before, and the vineyard, still very far from an exemplory growing area, got a small amount of attention.

This week, we will be planting and sowing as it our lives depended on it. Which they kinda do, but with the constant thought of can I feed the Collapse Laboratory in the back of my mind. I think I can, but there is an un-measureable amount of work to be inserted into the finite amount of time between now and then.

We shall persevere!

Until then then, please, I always ask you to take care of each other. I mean it.

Your loving Pirate Ben

xoxo

The purpose of The Barracks is to contemplate our changing world, and to ask how we can best be useful in a post-collapse world.

If you feel that there is nothing you can do in the daunting face of destructive climate change, perhaps coming to the Collapse Laboratory is the thing that you can do.

https://www.thebarracks.de/the-collapse-laboratory