It’s August and everybody’s vegetable gardens crank out delicious organic food. Yum-oh! But sometimes gardeners find holes in the middle of the leaves of their vegetable crops. Large holes. Many of them. Who’s the culprit? Caterpillars? Grasshoppers? Beetles?  Or maybe snails!

Snails and slugs both glide through your garden on a ribbon of slime, the shiny, sparkly stuff the snail in the photo above is leaving behind. At bottom left you can see the slime glistening on the ground. These animals are mollusks, related to oysters, clams, and octopus.

A trail of dried slime across the large hole in this green pepper is the definitive clue. A snail or slug definitely made this hole. Anytime you find holes in the leaves or fruit of your vegetable plants look for slime. Slime, this incontrovertible evidence tells you who to blame. And then you know how to fix it.

If you catch the buggers red-handed in the act of destroying your produce you don’t even have to search for evidence. This slug has just devoured the side of a friend’s tomato. Yuk!

But often, you can’t catch them in the act because they hide in the heat of the day. They come out at night, on overcast days, during rain storms, or when the sprinklers come on. They like it cool and wet and they hide under boards and pots – in any cool, shady, damp place where they can survive the mid-day sun and heat.

You can go out into the garden at night with a flashlight and hand pick snails easily. Just pick them up by the shell put them in a brown paper bag. Then you can step on it to crush the critters and bury it in your compost. Slugs, however, have no shells and are too slimy to pick up. Because slugs and snails hide during the day you can also make traps for them and that way you don’t have to go out at night with a flashlight. Put upside-down flower pots around your garden. They’ll hide inside them where you can easily harvest and destroy them in daytime comfort.

Iron phosphate controls these mollusks in the garden. You’ll find it under the brand name Sluggo. Iron phosphate is not toxic to pets, children, or birds. It also has no effect on insects. It kills mollusks and only mollusks. Slugs and snails eat it and they die.

 Older style, toxic, non-organic slug bait uses a poison called metaldehyde. Metaldehyde is poisonous to your pets, your kids, and wildlife. Avoid it.

 Some people swear by beer to kill slugs and snails. You’re supposed to put a shallow bowl of beer out in the garden, the slugs and snails are attracted by the odor, crawl into the beer and drown. Maybe I just don’t do it right but it’s never worked for me. 

San Diego, CA – We visit the San Diego Botanical Garden, in Encinitas, where we find many treasures including a small Permaculture Demonstration Garden. Permaculture, a concept developed originally by Bill Mollison of Australia, is a contraction of “Permanent and Agriculture”. It is a very rich system that stresses the use of perennial rather than annual plants, and employs many techniques that can be put into practice in small suburban lots as well as on large farms.

The Botanical Garden has a great example of a “keyhole” garden. The keyhole design, a Permaculture concept, features a single path leading to a central circle with shorter spokes of smaller paths radiating out from the center like petals on a flower. This design makes the entire planted area accessible from a single pathway, maximizing the planting area available for both edible and ornamental crops. Vegetables, flowers, and herbs are interplanted in a polyculture mix that helps to discourage insect pests and fungal diseases. Polycultures work because no plant’s nearest neighbor is the same as itself. This helps to prevent an insect pest or a fungal pathogen from leapfrogging from one plant to the next and wreaking havoc throughout your garden.

We also seize the opportunity to visit one of the “Edible Schoolyard” programs in the area at Cardiff Elementary School in Cardiff-by-the-Sea near Encinitas. Edible Schoolyards, a movement cfreated by Alice Waters of Berkely restaurant Chez Panise fame, is a national program for developing food production systems in local schools where kids can learn a variety of skills in addition to learning how to grow food. Cardiff Elementary received a generous grant from the Rob Machado Foundation for their garden. The grant funds allowed them to update the main garden site, including new equipment, irrigation system, and signage. The kids developed a “school-to-restaurant” pilot program. Students selected what to grow based on which crops a restaurant actually used. They harvested vegetables such as lettuce, carrots, and radishes, along with edible flowers and sold them to a local restaurant.

We also make two bookstore appearances in the San Diego area. The staff at Warwick’s, in La Jolla, are eager to share the book with their customers. We describe how we developed the book, and then hold a plant clinic at which we diagnose some plant problems that attendees have brought in. This is a lively group who really enjoys choosing their own adventure, as they use the diagnostic flow charts in the book. We look at the symptoms, answer the questions in the flow charts, and pretty soon we solve the mystery. These folks are not surprised to learn that becoming a plant detective is really fun.

In Coronado we’re at Bay Books, where people line up with baggies full of bits of plants in trouble for us to look at and help them figure out what has gone wrong. We use our book and show them how simple it is to discover the answer to their problems. And then we show them how to find a safe organic solution to fix the problem.

If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know. We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details (www.ddandkw.com/events)

Santa Barbara, California – a gardener’s paradise. While it may have heavy, clay soil, and little water, it has perfect temperatures for growing plants from all the “Mediterranean” climates of the world. The flora of South Africa, the west coasts of North and South America, Australia, and, of course, the Med itself make appearances here.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden displays the amazing diversity of flora native to California. The collection reaches into every corner of the state. Grasses, cacti, succulents, wildflowers, trees, and shrubs make a home here. The staff welcomes us warmly when we arrive to teach a morning workshop. We set up in the library to deliver a PowerPoint presentation followed by a hands-on diagnostic session. Some students have brought sick plants from home (contained in plastic bags to help prevent accidental introduction of pests or diseases into the botanic garden collection), and together we use the flow charts in our book to diagnose a wide variety of plant problems.

At the Book Loft in Solvang we enjoy an afternoon in the sun, signing books and diagnosing plant problems for the bookstore’s customers and passersby who are visiting the Danish village in the foothill. At Chaucer’s, a busy bookstore in Santa Barbara, we meet some avid, well-informed gardeners. Their enthusiasm for What’s Wrong with My Plant? is truly encouraging.

We explore shady trails through a forest of tree ferns in Lotusland, a botanical treasure featuring plants from all over the world. Madame Ganna Walska created this private garden on the estate she owned from 1941 until her death in 1984.

Lotusland features an amazing array of plants adapted to very dry environments. A large collection of succulent species of Aloe is featured in the photo above. Some people mistakenly call these plants cactuses. But they’re not cacti at all. Formerly included in the lily family, the Liliaceae, the aloes are now sometimes placed in a family of their own, the Aloaceae, or Asphodelaceae. Many of these plants have thick succulent leaves with a tremendous capacity for water storage.

Cacti have fleshy, water storing stems, and do not have leaves. Many have pretty flowers in bright colors. Cacti are placed in their own family, the Cactaceae, and are only found in the Americas. Most species are true desert plants and highly specialized for extremely arid conditions. Some are epiphytes, however, that grow on rainforest trees in the same manner as orchids and bromeliads.

Plants from desert regions of Africa and Asia that resemble cacti are in the family Euphorbiaceae. Although these plants superficially resemble cacti, their flowers have a completely different structure than those of the cacti.

If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know. We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details.