Let me take you to the western extremity of The Pudding Estate. There, amongst other things, you will find a green plastic water butt and four of our compost bins. All very ordinary and unremarkable you might think...
Yes, ordinary and unremarkable until you remove the lids.
Let us peer inside the water butt where approximately thirty five garden slugs reside. I have no idea how they got in there for the lid is tightly sealed and I don't know what they have been feeding on but they have created their own slug community where unmentionable things no doubt happen. It is my own Mar-a-Lago:-
I don't even know for sure what species of slug this is in spite of googling. Perhaps it is a previously undiscovered species that I shall name after Jacob Rees-Mogg, the outgoing Conservative MP for North Somerset. And I also don't know if this particular slug brings benefits to gardening and compost production. It is probably a kind of yellow slug - Limacus flavus.
Let me remove the lid from the middle bin.
Can you see them writhing around in the waste vegetable matter? There must be another fifty slugs in that particular bin but seemingly none inside the first bin you can see.
Slugs are much maligned creatures but I think they must be fascinating for biologists to study. On average, an English garden is home to over 20,000 slugs and it is estimated that an acre of farmland can support over 250,000 slugs. However, only around 5% of the slug population is above ground at any one time, with the other 95% spending their time underground, laying eggs and feeding on roots and seedlings.
My slugs are available for purchase. They make excellent companions and require minimal care. They are competitively priced. Requests should made in the "Comments" section.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/vJChzX8