We have deer who visit the garden. We have had rats (and from the amount of interest shown by a neighbourhood cat, I suspect they are still here). Now we also have killer slugs.

Just a few years ago, killer slugs only existed in books and gardening magazines. I had never seen one in real life. I’d seen some small slugs as a kid, but nothing since then.

Last summer I saw one or two shockingly large slugs in our garden. “Oh look, a slug – I wonder if it’s one of those Spanish killer slugs?” and that was that.

And this year they have arrived en masse. I probably missed one last year, so it found itself a nice nest and laid some eggs, and now its babies hatched and started colonising our garden. I have picked several dozens already.

They crawl around on my flowers. One of the bastards ate most of a broccoli plant before I caught it. And they are pretty disgusting to step on with bare feet.

Now we’re at war. I go on daily slug-picking rounds, especially near our compost hole. And I have declared a bounty on them: the kids get 1 krona for spotting a slug and telling me, and another if they kill it as well.

The least unpleasant extermination method (for all parties involved) that I’ve come up with is freezing them. I have a slug jar (an empty can of coconut milk) in the freezer, covered with a plastic bag. Whenever I find one, it goes in the jar. When the jar starts filling up, I empty it in the compost hole.

Interesting slug fact of the day: the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History is so interested in slugs that they invite the public to send them slugs for identification. Apparently it is very hard to reliably distinguish them from the outside, you need to look at their anatomy for proper identification. I considered sending a few to them but really I don’t care what species they are. They are in my garden, they are too many, and they are eating my broccoli – I will kill them regardless of species.

Slug fact #2: they are tricky to photograph! They are not frightened by sound or movement. But as soon as anything touches them, even just a blade of grass that I want to move out of the way, they defensively pull themselves into a dense little lump, just a third of their stretched-out size, and then they stay that way. I haven’t yet had the patience to wait for them to re-emerge.

Same place, same scale, same two slugs. The smaller was about the size of my index finger in its relaxed state; the larger was longer than my middle finger.