The slug season has begun. There are already dozens of those little devils in and around our garden. They ate most of the new growth of a hosta plant before I noticed them.

Ingrid and I go on regular slug hunts. The hunting is best in the evening or morning, after rain. The best hunting ground is the wasteland between the street and the root cellar, and onwards along the edge of the road. It looks like the ones that reached the hostas also started their invasion from that direction. I guess some of them wintered somewhere in that area, and now laid a batch of eggs.

I pay her a bounty: 1 krona per slug found, and another krona if she also disposes of it. One night she found 16 slugs and earned almost as much as a week’s pocket money in about a quarter of an hour.

They are easy to spot in low grass and on plants, but not so easy on bare soil. And they are especially not easy to spot when there is dead plant material on that soil. A wet old piece of wood, a curled-up dead leaf, a piece of pine bark mulch: there are surprisingly many finger-length brown objects in a garden.