Weird smells and slug slime....

A couple of minutes ago, Aidan walked in the house and said "It smells weird in here." Yea, I bet it does. Silently, I remembered what I had been doing for the last couple of hours...blending tomatoes for freezer sauce, drying hot peppers for use later in the year, making the syrup for plum fruit leather, drying cherries and crisping the sliced cukes in salt water for making bread and butter pickles later today. With all those projects, I guess it was bound to smell weird. Hopefully when the smells settle down, it will taste good.

As you can tell, the garden is coming on strong right now. Just about everything is ready to eat, can, pickle or dry. Keeps a girl busy when she might rather be at the river soaking up the rays. Luckily, today is cool and rainy so the kitchen sounds just fine.

Earlier when I went out to the garden to harvest all that said produce, I knew it had been rainy because I saw about 157 slugs and their mothers. When it is hot, the slugs vacation in the forest but when it is cool and wet, they lounge in the garden eating beans and cucumbers and tomatoes and looking more like pigs than slugs. Ever seen a snout on an overfed slug? Trust me, it isn't pretty.

I try to be charitable about the slugs, figuring they have to make a living too; but sometimes their over-zealous appetites get the better of my cheery disposition. Like a couple of days ago when I went out to pick that gorgeous red tomato I had been watching ripen all week. I reached my hand out to pick it and my fingers went right through to the slimy front. YUCK! Those buggers had secretly been eating their fill from the back. Such a disappointment. Luckily for the larder, there are more tomatoes out there or I might have to complain.

I wonder, do the slugs have some kind of hierarchy to lodge complaints with? I can just imagine the unsympathetic slug king munching on a throne of bean plants (surely one of their favorite foods). "Sorry, Mam. You are gonna have to get by. A slug is gonna do what a slug gotta do." Munch, munch. Guess I should be happy that I already harvested enough beans to make a couple of batches of dilly beans and some dinner. They really are sharing my garden with me.