Well, here on the micro-farm it’s that time of year: namely, spring. While most of the rest of the continent above 35-degrees north latitude shivers through another frigid January, here at 47-North the buds on the early-blooming trees are already beginning to swell. It is, of course, the fault of our proximity to the thermal mass that is the North Pacific Ocean. While the country east of the coast ranges of the left-most side of the continent get their winter air straight down from the North Pole by way of Canada, the thin, hundred-mile wide band along the coast, shriven by tectonic faults and pierced by innumerable volcanos, enjoys winter weather that has been warmed and moistened by the tail end of the Kuroshiro current – the Pacific’s much larger cousin of the Gulf Stream. Admittedly, “warm” is a relative modifier but, even when we had a record low temperature of 29°F this past week, it’s much warmer here than in North Dakota or any of the other Red States north of Mississippi and Alabama.

So gardening begins, in fits and starts at first, but even in January there’s work to be done on the micro-farm; work that includes planting new seeds. The first crop of cold-weather greens – spinach and pak choi – has been sown in the still-warmer greenhouse, and, as it promised on the package, germinated in 10 days to 2 weeks. This is, along with the over wintered garlic just showing green shoots above the mulch, truly the first blush of spring. It will build from here of course. Next month will be the time to plant the outside cold weather greens and start, indoors, the seeds that will follow. The kale and broccoli, cabbage and herbs an endless bounty of tiny plants which, in a few short months will be savagely ripped out of the ground and eaten.

Except.

It might now be by us. Unless we get to them first. If recent developments in the greenhouse are to serve as an example, that’s not going to happen.

Last Friday, the greenhouse had five rows of tiny dicotyledon plants, pushing their leaves to the sky and soaking up the warmth and sunshine – no, really. Then, by Sunday, the hopeful crop had been reduced to so many pale green stumps as if someone with a tiny, tiny lawnmower had swept through the hothouse bringing everything down to a precise height. Of course, the weeds had been spared, but all of the putative crops had been summarily snipped. Shorn off precisely one-third of an inch above the ground; the exact height of the ravenous maw of a garden slug.

Now, in the hierarchy of micro-farm predators, slugs must surely rank near the bottom; except perhaps in the overall creepiness department. I mean why do they leave that slimy trail of snot? And how can they keep it up for miles? But in terms of absolute damage, they rank up at the top if only for their propensity for snacking on just-sprouted plants. One pass by a slug can reduce a potential twenty heads of lettuce to so much wishful thinking. You plant. They wait. They come. They eat.

And then comes the bad part.

They vanish. You can follow their slippery loops across the south forty (square yards) and when you trace them to the end: nothing. It’s like they run out of tail-spit and have to get beamed back up to the mother ship for a recharge.

These wannabe escargots escape without a trace, leaving behind a trail of destruction gleaming silver in the moonlight. But they’re easy to stop. We could soak the micro-farm in some noxious cocktail of unpronounceable organic acids, but those might prove similarly toxic to the birds – both wild and egg-laying poultry varieties. Not a good plan. Or we could get a couple of cans of iron phosphate pellets – a natural byproduct of dissolving your Chevy in Coca-Cola – but that too entails expense and shipping and unintended downstream consequences.

What we needed to do – oddly enough for a legless gastropod (Latin for stomach foot) – was to strike at its Achilles heel. To nail the slimy bags of protoplasm right where it hurts: at the pub.

Slugs, it turns out, are inordinately fond of beer. If you put out little plates of beer, the slugs will find them, start slugging – if you’ll pardon the pun – it down, and then fall in and drown. Scoop out the dead slugs and you’re all set for tonight’s revelry.

To this end, I put out several small cups in the greenhouse, filled them with beer, and waited for the inevitable. The results: happily drowned slugs and the restored potential for an eventual harvest.

But wait. Weren’t you just bitching about organic slug-bait at eight bucks a pound?

You betcha. And that’s why I use beer. It’s free.

It is Seattle, after all. The place that is synonymous with micro-breweries. When a social gathering breaks out at the micro-farm attendees typically bring beer or wine to drink and, as most people 1) can’t drink an entire six-pack at a sitting and 2) usually drink enough to lose count, we’re blessed with seemingly endless bottles of such things as “Rusty Blade Pumpkin Ale” or “Nappy Bottom Summer Pilsner” or “Blackhead Brewery’s February Stout.” All of which have one thing in common: they’re undrinkable swill.

Now I’m sure they’re fine beers as such, but I’m not a beer drinker – unless you count the occasional Corona or Dos Equis – so the bottles accumulate out back waiting for the onset of slug season.

I just need to remember to start killing slugs before the seeds germinate.

Maybe next year.

We did learn that lesson for our other major garden destroyer: the wily deer. And this year we’re doing something about it before they have a chance to step into the garden and nibble a single squash. (They don’t seem to like squash, they just take a bite and move onto the next, always hoping that the next one will taste better. Sort of like what I do with beer.)

As I detailed many year ago, we installed an electric deer-zapper fence around the orchard when we planted the trees and blueberry bushes. Except for a single incident which was entirely the fault of me being lazy, the fence has worked like a charm. The trick is, like beer for slugs, to exploit the deer’s weakness for artificial apple-scented glop. We dribble a little glop into these metal cups that hang on the fence, then turn on the juice. In the late evening or early morning, kind, gentle, innocent little Bambi strolls up to the fence following the Siren-scent of apples and licks the cup. BAM! 9,000 volts of DC course through the fence and into the ever-so-sensitive mouthparts of the vandalizing ruminant. The rest was mere Pavlovian conditioning. The end result being that the deer now give the orchard a wide berth on the way to tear up the garden.

Not this year.

We’ve decided to electrify the entire homestead. From the blueberry farm to the south to the roads north and west, the whole place will be strung and wired with enough DC voltage to send Nikola Tesla spinning in his grave.

But it’s a project several times bigger than the fence around the orchard. Forty-four new fence posts need to be pounded into the rocky moraine soil. Two-hundred plus insulating connectors, three gates, twenty five “Touch this wire” signs to let the fence do double duty with the kids in the neighborhood. It will take three-quarters of a mile of conductor to seal the place in and – my favorite part – about twenty of the little metal caps to hold the synthetic apple glop.

It won’t be all fun and games though. We have to redesign the stripes in the meadow. We have to account for space for the electrified chicken run and avoid allowing the two electro-magnetic fields to intersect catastrophically like in Ghostbusters. I’ve got to move the compost piles. I have to pound in those fence posts. Plus, unlike the orchard fence which I threw out in a trice, this fence will be visible from everywhere, so the posts will have to be what’s known as “vertical” and the corners need a property called “square,” whatever that means.

The project is underway. Some thirty-one fence posts have already been acquired. Seven have been driven into the earth. The meadow is dotted with little red flags showing the eventual fence line and where, inside the Perimeter of Pain, we’ll be able to grow grapes, safe from the wistful brown eyes of the herds assembled at the boundary.

Still it’s January, and, if memory serves, spring will be upon us in no time at all. This year will be different. The garden will grow and blossom, fruit and root. With the slugs in the bag, the deer reduced to Cervinae non grata, and the gophers trapped, frozen, and sent off as food for eagles at the wildlife rehabilitation center, all will be well on the micro-farm.

Hope, it seems, does spring eternal.