Just so you know, this post has nothing to do with gardening. It has everything to do with you.

You’ll relate to this post if you’ve been working really, really hard on your business or career and it just keeps turning out slugs.

I love marigolds.

They’re so beautiful. They’re happy. They smell great.

I used to plant marigolds when I lived in Prince George, BC–a great town and a great town to plant marigolds in–but I had a problem. They kept getting eaten by slugs.

I’d awake in the morning, eager to see my new garden only to find that the slugs had been busy the night before. They crawled up to the base of the buds–they liked the buds the best–and ate a hole in the bottom and then crawled in and devoured the whole bud from the inside. Just before they were ready to bloom. The bud was done. It died. That gorgeous flower never got to shine its beautiful, sunny presence in my garden.

This drove me crazy! I tried a lot of things to keep the slugs from eating my marigold buds.

Apparently copper tape that you can wrap in a ring around plants will help to keep the slugs out.

That didn’t work.

I tried egg shells. I heard that slugs don’t like crawling across broken egg shells. I saved my empty egg shells, washed them out and let them air dry and then crushed them into jagged shards and then sprinkled them in rings around all of my marigolds.

That didn’t work.

I tried beer in a shallow dish. Apparently, slugs like the smell of beer and then will drown themselves in the cup. So I got a shallow dish, dug a shallow pit that would fit the dish perfectly, carefully poured my husband’s beer into the dish and went to sleep dreaming of the full dish of slugs I’d have the next morning.

That didn’t work.

I had the potential of a beautiful garden set to bloom but it wasn’t happening because of these darned slugs.

All of this effort that I had been putting in to keep the slugs from eating my marigold buds was completely and totally ineffective.

They were hiding in this soil that I had spent so many hours sweating over and nurturing. I built compost, a labour intensive process, where I hand turned big piles with a shovel every week to create this incredible, rich, loamy mulch so my plants could thrive and grow. The slugs loved this mulch, and they loved hiding underneath the thyme, a plant that spreads low over the soil like a carpet.

What if I went after the source? I was determined to rid my garden of them, so I started to search out those slugs and pick them, by hand, one-by-one out of my garden.

I thought I would be dealing with slugs about an inch long. That’s the size they were in my mind. And hoo boy, if I knew the size the slugs grow to here on Vancouver Island where I now live (4 or 5 inches), I might not have been so eager. But no, these slugs were tiny. So tiny, that they were easy to overlook. Easy to underestimate the damage they could cause.

When I finally started picking out those slugs–actually addressing the issue at the source instead of managing the issue–my garden started to flourish.

The exact same things happens in our businesses. We have such potential for beautiful gardens but we have slugs hiding in there, in the mulch that we have so lovingly crafted. They’re waiting for their moment to come out. Your self doubt is a slug that will keep your bud from blooming. Another one: waiting until your website or online program or elevator pitch is perfect. Another: I don’t know if people really NEED my services. Another: filling your days with busy work instead of productive work.

What are some of the slugs keeping your garden from blooming?