Putting Garden Gangsters on the Spot.

Things are quiet in the garden just now. It is the period of pause when the turnips cease from turning and the radish takes a rest. With the exception of the somnolent drip of a winter leak or the muffled throb of a stymied beetroot, there is practically nothing doing in the vegetable world.

But is the go-getter gardener resting on his laurels and lettuces? Is he idly ensconced in the inglenook, dreaming of pumpkins so swelled that they have to be handled by a breakdown gang, and cabbages calculated to put a band rotunda to the blush? No sir! He is planning his winter campaign against the forces of insecticidal disorder among the rows and ridges of the ancestral acres. For, according to such authorities as Ho On and Un Yun, “You catchum sluggie to-day—you savem cabbagee to-mollow,” which is one of those inscrutable wisecracks of the East, so bursting with poetic thought yet stagnant with age-old truth. For how true it is that the lone earwig of today produces the crowded auditorium of to-morrow. And so the gardener who is “au fait” with his onions, and allied fruits, lies in wait behind the parsley to slug the slug, get the wood on the wood-bug, and generally waylay the gastronomical gangsters of the garden, before they can select soulmates and produce bed-loads of bugs and slugs for the spring offensive.

Science plays many parts, and research has not been idle in the realms of the rhubarb. To you, dear reader, whose gardening is confined to the idle petting of the potted petunia, it may seem simple to slug a slug or bag a bug; but the Men of Garlic know that there is a right and a wrong way of making the world safe for celery. And so one should study the lives and loves of the garden gobblers. You may imagine that one simply hits a slug a dong on the dome and leaves it for dead.