Moss slurry is essentially liquified moss. It can be made with just water and moss, but moss also responds well to fermented products like buttermilk and beer. To grow moss on a vertical plane, it seems like you've got to include some thickening agents like egg or flour or something else. See Blended Moss at the bottom of this page, or else search for "moss slurry" online; there are a bunch of sites describing different techniques.
The blending process releases tiny moss spores which infiltrate whatever substrate you are using, and in the end, you have a liquified material that will turn into healthy moss! So in five weeks, we'll see if the design turns into a puffy green sun!
I put together the "umbrella" structure you see in some of the Pop Quiz pictures to make sure rain didn't wash the design away, and that has worked sufficiently, but there has been an unexpected hitch: slugs.
See how nice and full the darkened "third eye" of the design is?
Now look what the slugs did to it over the course of a couple days.
They chewed up a lot of it and thinned out the rest of the design. Hungry little buggers!
Sue suggested salt might work, so I blended up sea salt "paint" with a whole lotta sea salt, a little water, an egg, flour, corn starch, garlic powder, and crushed red and cayenne pepper powders. The result is a potent anti-slug concoction that can easily be washed off once/if the moss flourishes.
In addition to deploying the salt shield, I "re-painted" the moss design with a second variety of moss. (You can see the salt shield, in these pics below, got slightly washed away by Monday's storm. I reinforced it last night.)
Look how the hungry, devious little sluginator encounters the shield and is repulsed! As Mr. Hackworth would say, "Hooray!"
Unfortunately, the shield is working so effectively, some smaller slugs are paying the ultimate price.
(I hope the sea salt and garlic and pepper powders don't inhibit moss growth. That'd be disappointing.)
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