Thursday, May 21, 2015

A Yummy Snack

I've been trying to figure out what's in our garden as the plants take off (and in some cases, take over). We moved into a fully planted perennial garden so there's no shortage of growing things, but we weren't paying a lot of attention when we moved in and some things aren't recognizable yet. (A weed? Not a weed? I don't know sometimes.)

This last weekend it was finally dry enough to spend some serious time out there, and at the end of day, when I was too tired to do any more work, I started looking up some of my unidentifiables in a perennial book I have. And realized that we have a lot of different kinds of hostas. On further reading I saw that most people with hostas fret about slugs getting to them. I'd already seen that we have slugs in our garden - little ones, not the monster ones my Opa used to scare me with - but aside from some damage to our tulips (which survived just fine), I really hadn't seen any damage to the many (many) hostas planted here. Why wouldn't they be suffering from the slugs?

I had a guess...

Photo: An opossum peeking around the stump of a tree
This is not our possum, we haven't managed to take any photos of it.
This lovely photo comes to us courtesy of National Geographic.
And a little internet research confirmed it - opossums eat slugs.

Yes!

I can live with a little possum poop if it means fewer slugs.

Investigatingly,
Annie

2 comments:

  1. So have you actually met your gardening assistant in charge of slug control?

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  2. Oh, yes, several times. It's HUGE! We cannot figure out where it lives when it is not hanging out on the vines cradling our deck (and scaring the bejeezus out of me on occasion, since I never expect to see it there), but as long as it's not in our attic, I'm okay. Plus they eat rats too, which is also an issue in the city.

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