slooooogs

Slugs must have a good sense of smell. On wet days, if I leave the dogfood out too late, they crawl onto the porch, into the black plastic outer bowl, through the "moat" of water that I keep in the black plastic bowl to discourage ants, and into the inner bowl which has the dogfood.

Did you know that slugs are hermaphroditic, with both male and female sex organs? And that supposedly* there's this thing they sometimes do, called apophallation?


* Sometimes I wonder how much of everything I hear and read is really true. I assume that a lot of it has at least some truth to it, but I don't have personal proof, so most of what I "know" is based on hearsay. And sometimes things that are widely thought to be true later turn out to be wrong.

scratched up grass

The small section of the yard where I laid down new grass sod has been a failure. At least 3/4s of it is dead/gone, mostly from the dogs trampling and scratching it up. (When Serena barks at things (as well as after doing her business), she tends to aggressively scratch the ground with her back legs). I left the temporary fencing around the new sod for as long as possible, but it too succumbed to the dogs.

Not only is the sod 3/4s dead, but there is thin green plastic netting sticking up out of the dirt. The netting was originally under the squares of sod. When I laid the sod, I debated whether I was supposed to remove the netting or not. Removing it would have required turning the sod upside down (which could have caused it to fall apart), so I figured that the netting was supposed to stay in place, and that the grass roots would just grow through it. But now with it sticking up out of the dirt, it looks even worse than the dirt does on its own. Yet I don't want to pull the net up, because that would kill the remaining handful of grass.

But I have a new idea. We can get some edging blocks, put them in a circle around the tree where the ground slopes down, fill the inside with soil, and plant border grass inside there. Border grass seems to do rather well in my yard.