Slugs & Snails are waiting in the foyey for those young succulent green tips. What is your counter

Yes it's that season again. We have not ony got terrible weather, but those slugs and snails are waiting in the shadows. They are drooling at the mouth for the taste of those new tips an shoots. So gardeners. What are you going to do about it?????? Please share your views and use's of what's on the market to fight off these critters.

 

When living in our Bexhill property it was a haven for slugs and snails..1. The area was always going to be damp as a known high water table. 2. The terrain was lower than anything around us.
Any rainy day once stopped we would go around the gardens with a bucket and collect loads and loads of the beasties....We took them across the Lane to the woods..happy badgers....
When we decided to have ducks the slugs and snails were very down in there numbers, so that was the best deterrent. Other things we tried before the garden wreckers arrived was eggs shells crunched up and placed around the plants...sea shells broken up and scattered, make a beer trap, cooper tape around the potted plants....Ducks hands down..you will find they ruin the garden though.

 

slugs should need to edit slugs more slugs and even more slugs..no problem here though..think having chickens helps..
could be drier your way with the wind frequency issue...

 

I don't like using chemicals in the garden, but I will for a slight advantage in keeping at least an outside chance of growing flowering plants. I pellet from valentines day until guy fawkes night, but normally, on a clear, early spring evening, when all is still and in between the gentle, passive background noises of the local woods, you can honestly hear the rasping sounds of gastropods, as they raze my garden to the ground.
I have a healthy garden population of hedgehogs, slow worms, frogs and other predators to assist me in my quest, but it's a battle I lose each year

 

I don't have a problem with slugs and snails here. I can count the amount of slugs I've seen in three years on one hand and have never seen a snail. I don't think they like my soil or the climate.

 

Main effort to deal with slugs here is to encourage the wildlife that would make a meal out of them. Got a pond for frogs and found it also helps the birds that I have noticed seem to visit it regularly. Usually see lots of potential feathered slug eaters about the garden now with lots of plants that give them food and shelter like whitethorn and cotoneasters. Also have some hedgehogs and in a few out of sight parts of the garden I have stacked up pruned branches and other garden waste to allow places for them to find shelter. Ground beetles and centipedes also have lots of places to shelter with the large volume of stones found in the garden used to make low walls and edging with plenty of crevices for them to make homes for themselves.

Still see the odd slug about but not in the numbers to be a major problem as the garden has matured. Also tried this method for knocking their numbers back a few years ago but not sure how much that has contributed to them becoming less widespread in the garden and think its more likely to be just that the ecosystem has developed to make life for them to be more hazardous through a number of factors. Still hunt out the odd one hiding under pots or somewhere else when I see some damage done and checking obvious slug hiding places is something I do occasionally when time is available. As mentioned I'm finding less in recent times so hoping that trend continues.

Happy gardening!

 

Moin everyone

Well I went through a few stages after getting my own garden:

1. Wow, there aren't that many slugs around
2. Who ate my Basil?
3. Live and let die. I'm sure the slugs and I can come to an agreement
4. Who the **** ate all my tobacco plants and gnawed on my peas?
5. This means war!!!!

Essence of the story:
I lay traps by putting wet wooden planks on the ground during summer and basically pick the slugs right off them. Then they go in a bucket filled with soapy water so they don't crawl their way out and flush em down the toilet.

Alternative 1: Just cut them with a pair of scissors, but the may have eggs inside them

Alternative 2: Take an old broomstick, hammer a loooong nail (at least 10cm, better 20) into the bottom. Use some pliers to cut the nails head off and sharpen to hearts content. Then just pick the slugs up like the trash they are and either put them in a bucket or show them the power of centrifugal forces and fling em as far as you can (preferably not into the neighbors garden, unless you hate them, then by all means go ahead)

 

Just looked out my kitchen window through the mizzle, there they were, about 14 small snails. Crawling along the bottom of the window, around the rim of a pot of fargesia and along the garden wall.
If I wasn't recovering from this covid lark, I'd be out there telling them off

 

I am not too keen on using chemicals in the garden. My belief being. Everything is there for a reason. Having in mind, that familiar picture of a large tree and all of it's inhabitants, then the way each dweller acts upto the next. Sadly here, there are so many cats. I installed a bird feeder, forked out a few quid for an assortment seed. The birds loved it. Then I noticed the cats, surroung the setup, mouths drewling. I firmly believe mankind is has become victim of his own making.
For slugs and snails. I resort to pellets and sprays.

 

I tend to leave them alone, I don't mind a few nibbles on my plants here and there.
But when they crawn in between the spines of my cacti and eat the flesh it makes me angry so I use 'environmentally friendly' (whatever that means) slug pellets which I discovered last ear. I only use them sparingly inside the perspex shelter and cold frames where my cacti live in the summer, so I don't feel guilty about birds eating the dead ones.
I also use them inside the shelter where I sow seeds.

 

Warning:This is not for the faint-hearted! I am normally a reasonably kind person but not when it comes to slugs. To deter them I wait until the beasts emerge at dusk on a still, damp evening, have a fortifying glass of wine or two (me, not the slugs) then go out in the garden 'slug-sticking' - chopping every slug I see in half with a spade. I got over a hundred in twenty minutes one evening. When it's dark some creature comes along and eats them all because the garden is always cleared of the massacre by the next morning.

 

The house we used to have, in the countryside in Devon, was surrounded by slugs once evening arrived ( especially damp evenings) it felt like The Day Of The Zombies but with slugs instead, as they converged on us outside. Not just outside either as a few hardy ones squeezed themselves under our wooden door and made a beeline for the cat food.
We used to gather them up in a bucket ( hundreds of the things) and take them down the lane to release them.Think they were homing slugs though.The huge orange or white ones made me shudder.We did have a few toads in the garden ( an all you can eat buffet!) but needed ducks really.
The house we have now ( or rather garden) is the polar opposite, there are one or two snails
About but haven’t seen a single slug here in nine years.