HLM -Chapter 1185 On Several Methods of Exterminating Pests

Under the cover of night, a group of people—along with dogs, cats, and a parrot—headed to the vegetable garden.

The night was gloomy, the sky overcast and pitch black, with no moon in sight.

Little Wang wagged his tail nervously, ran a few quick steps to Wang Bo, and looked up at him with a very peculiar expression.

“Damn it, you’re scared of the dark too? Are you descended from lions and tigers or what?” Wang Bo exclaimed angrily. The braver Little Wang got, the more timid he seemed.

Father Bo glanced at the sky and said, “Nights like this can be pretty scary. Looks like a storm is coming. We’d better catch the slugs quickly; if it rains, they’ll get really bold.”

Mother Bo added, “The worst is strong wind. They lay eggs on the leaves, and if the wind blows them around, we’ll have slugs everywhere.”

Though soft and flimsy-looking, slugs are incredibly resilient creatures. Only drought and scorching sunlight are their natural enemies; nothing else in nature poses much threat. They also tolerate hunger and thirst well, able to survive for a long time without food under poor conditions.

Despite their small size, a single slug can destroy vegetables dozens of times its own weight in just one night. Truly, they “eat as they go, leave a trail as they pass.”

Father Bo said, “Back in our cucumber patch—about two acres—hundreds of slugs wiped it out in just a few days.”

“The worst was Old Liu’s chives. The slugs ate them so badly that he got no harvest that year.”

Wang Bo was shocked. “They’re that powerful?”

Mother Bo explained, “Your father tends to exaggerate. He didn’t make it clear—the chives are sold for their leaves, and if the leaves are full of holes, nobody will buy them. Your Sixth Uncle’s chives had so many holes they were unsellable.”

Wang Bo hesitated. “In that case… shouldn’t we just use pesticides? Our vegetable garden is too big.”

In professional agriculture, large-scale pest control is typically done with chemicals.

Father Bo disagreed: “This garden is for our own family. We want pure, pollution-free vegetables. What are these vegetables again?”

“Organic vegetables.”

“Ah yes, organic vegetables. We can’t use pesticides. If we do, they’re no longer organic.”

Wang Bo was amazed at his father’s ability to coin terms: Dad, you truly are my dad!

In New Zealand, pesticides aren’t easy to use. Unlike rural China, where agricultural supply stores are common, such shops are forbidden in New Zealand. Buying pesticides is even harder than getting antibiotics.

Wang Bo sighed. “Dad, hundreds of hectares of land… Are you really planning to catch all the pests by hand? If we do, we’d better get all the helpers.”

Even with the garden well-managed, manpower is necessary. Wang Bo had hired over twenty helpers to assist his parents in vegetable production; otherwise, relying on just the two elders would have exhausted them.

Mother Bo said, “Don’t act like a wimp. Remember what I told you as a kid? The more you work, the less it seems. Besides, there aren’t that many pests—slugs only appear in the bok choy patch.”

Wang Bo tried to recall the area of the bok choy plot, but it had been a long time since he visited the garden. At most, he managed it via the model layout, so he had no mental image of the plot.

The bok choy patch was in the southeast corner of the garden, where the slugs had appeared. Luckily, Wang Bo’s parents were diligent and checked daily, which is how they discovered the slugs.

Though small, the bok choy plot still covered about ten acres. Wang Bo shook his head; this would be a long and enduring battle.

Slug-catching required manual work. Father Bo brought some small plastic buckets and sprinkled them with edible salt. Once slugs were caught and thrown in, they would quickly dehydrate and die.

Slugs are similar to snails without shells, with slimy bodies filled with water. They fear heat and light, essentially anything that dehydrates them. Aside from sunlight and high temperatures, other methods like desiccants can work, but since there were no desiccants in the castle, Father Bo prepared salt—it worked just as well.

Everyone put on hats with headlamps and disposable rubber gloves and began catching slugs.

Dale laughed excitedly after dressing up. “Brother-in-law, look! I’ve become a miner!”

Wang Bo praised her: “Where did this cute little miner come from? Come, let’s mine together…”

Father Bo shot him an angry glare. “You’re an adult. How can you talk so casually?”

Wang Bo felt confused but then realized his words might indeed have been slightly ambiguous. Dale didn’t notice and continued adjusting her headlamp to look cute.

The group spread out. The young little heiress quickly exclaimed, “Look! I caught two of them together!”

The two slugs were stacked atop one another. Wang Bo shook his head. That mischievous kid had no idea how cruel his actions were—those slugs were surely furious; they were mating.

Lifting the bok choy leaves made the slugs easy to spot, their glistening slime reflecting the headlamp light. Wang Bo quickly caught over ten and threw them into the bucket. Without a shell, contact with salt rapidly dehydrated the slugs, and too much dehydration meant death.

But this method was extremely inefficient. After sweeping the area for a while, Wang Bo stood up, pulled out his phone, and searched online for help.

Googling “how to deal with slugs” returned chemical solutions as the first answer.

In New Zealand, there’s a pesticide called SlugBait, inexpensive and widely available in supermarkets.

Wang Bo perked up. The instructions claimed it was effective against slugs. However, due to its low toxicity, it could only paralyze slugs for a few hours—not kill them. Low-toxicity, high-efficiency pesticides simply didn’t exist in New Zealand.

Various other methods circulated online, and Wang Bo couldn’t help but laugh.

Some suggested burying a cup in the soil near plants and filling it with beer or sugar water to attract slugs to drown. Others suggested sprinkling coffee grounds, which would kill slugs via caffeine poisoning. Some even recommended creating a dark, damp trap for slugs overnight, then capturing them all at dawn.

Wang Bo couldn’t help laughing aloud. New Zealanders were endearingly quirky—treating slug-catching like a spy operation! He read the methods aloud, and everyone laughed.

But just then, the sky began to drizzle. Wang Bo’s parents could no longer find anything to laugh about.