The salad days of summer are overrun with critters

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, August 5, 2026

THESE ARE THE salad days of summer. When it’s possible to stroll into the garden and pick a salad. Unless the slugs ate your lettuce.

In all my years of gardening, I’ve never seen so many slugs.

I blame the mild winter, but who knows the real reason.

The first slug was observed back in February, and they have done nothing but increase in size and numbers since then.

The Hoh Rainforest is home to the creepiest of all slugs, the banana slug.

Tourists love them, and I encourage all our visitors to take a slug home if they love them so much, but they don’t.

It is my belief that slugs are evolving into even more demonic creatures after picking 18 of them out of one hanging basket. Causing questions to be asked: How did they get there? Did they fly?

I would not put it past them.

Then, there was the time I left my boots outside overnight.

I put one on and felt something squishy. There was a slug in my boot!

Growing a vegetable garden has become more than just a hobby.

It can be one of the best ways to cope with the rising cost of groceries. And there’s nothing that beats the taste of the fresh vegetables you harvest from your own garden.

It can give a sense of pioneer pride to walk out in the garden and pick something for dinner instead of driving to the grocery store to pay for it.

That is the dream anyway.

It is a dream that can quickly fade into a runaway nightmare of vermin, disease and failure.

This is my story.

It’s important when growing a vegetable garden to know when to give up.

For example, strawberries must be the single most desirable crop on planet Earth.

Who doesn’t like strawberries?

Everybody loves them.

By that, I mean every critter, from slugs to mice to squirrels to robins, all love strawberries.

They will even eat them when they are green.

Something is liable to eat half of them before you even get one berry.

So, I gave up on strawberries.

Moving on, it was time to harvest the potatoes.

Last year, the mice ate so many spuds that all I had left to harvest was a few scraps.

To outsmart the mice, I gathered plastic buckets, cut a drain hole in the bottom, filled them with compost and planted a potato in each one.

They grew tall and green.

With a feeling of immense pride, I emptied one of the buckets only to my shock and dismay to discover the mice had no problem getting into the buckets to eat the potatoes.

I gave up.

I like to grow rutabagas to mix with the potatoes I don’t have.

It’s an old pioneer trick to make the spuds last longer, but it was just my luck the rutabagas were wormy.

By then, it was time to harvest the artichokes, but there weren’t any.

Something ate every one of them when they were about the size of a walnut.

The corn was ankle-high by the end of July.

The cabbage was the size of baseballs, the onions the size of golf balls.

The root maggots got the cauliflower.

That’s OK, I know beans.

My beans were rocketing skyward on their genetically engineered cedar bean poles.

Until they wilted.

Something had tunneled underneath and eaten the bean roots. Voles!

The zucchini grew to be about the size of a hot dog then turned brown on the blossom end.

Who can’t grow a zucchini? Me, apparently.

So, I gave up.

Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist.” He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.