Tidy slugs.

I had a revelation today, I just had to tell someone.


We don't like slugs here and although we don't get them around the back door like we used to thanks to our resident hedgehog, they congregate on the front step and path, waving their antenna around like they're having a nice chat so my shoes get all messy if I want to go out - and barefoot sallies into the garden to savour the cool air in the evening are a thing of the dim and distant past. I don't want to use pellets because of our cat not to mention our child but equally I don't want to get rid of the few birds the cat didn't get. Baby slugs seem to have turned the mulch around my young box beds into their nursery, they put Little Cacadore off from going in her sand pit and they infest her indoor's cat's food bowl. For some reason the fat brown slugs of last year (which some people think are just black slugs on holiday) have gone and long, slim black slugs from all over are making our garden their home.

The battles so far have gone like this:

Picking them up and throwing them out onto the unmetalled road outside. Seems to work if it hasn't rained as they can't slither there; less risky than throwing them onto the neighbour's lawn but yuk, slimey fingers and the road's too far from the back lawn. Using anything else to pick them up with takes too long. I can't wash it off my hands easily either. Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Picking them up and popping them in a bucket of salty water. Now that works; they don't like it and I can pour the resulting liquid on the compost. Yukky, slimey fingers, though.

Traps: I found the best is to put a sheet of damp cardboard on the lawn, wait for the top surface to dry out and in the evening turn it upside down and there's hundreds of them there I can sprinkle salt over. They don't like it. But what to do with the cardboard? Shove in the bin and get fined by the council, burn it in the wood-burning stove where dead slugs drop on the carpet and it smokes the house out? Not so simple.

- Beer in a bowl. I havn't tried that only because it seems a waste of beer considering the scale of the infestation.

Egg-shells. Microwave egg shells, crush them in a bag, sprinkle them around your prize plants - they stick to the slugs and stop them slithering. I started collecting shells a month ago and I have just about enough to put to one side and lose while I wait to collect enough to surround one plant. At Christmas, I expect.

Salt: now I like salt. Salt is cruel: one grain on a slug's back and its insides come outside. The fact slugs might have well-developed nervous systems makes this method strangely more attractive somehow, I don't know why but.. and it's a big but, sprinkling a few grains of salt might be OK if I want to crawl around the herbacious borders hunting them but on paths - I still have to pick them up afterwards only now I can't: they turn into unsightly, lumpy slime which even a rain-shower can't remove. And now her indoors complains she's got no salt to cook with.

- The cat's bowl: now I put the bowl in an open cardboard box because slugs can't slither on cardboard as long as it's not sopping wet, but in case it gets wet I sprinkle salt over the base. Works for a while. When I notice the cat getting too thin again I put more salt over the box.

Yesterday I saw a long black mollusc crawling over the french window step and making its way into my living room! NO.

That's going too far. It means war.

So one day, I was spraying weeds and ants on the patio with vinegar when I saw a long black slug and thought I'd see how he likes it. The vinegar just washed over him: nothing. I went back to the ants, glanced back and saw the slug had just slithered off somewhere. Oh well.

The vinegar, by the way, is mixed with half water, a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of washing up liquid and I keep it in a plastic coke bottle with the mechanical spray mechanism from a kitchen cleaning product screwed on top.

Then today; the revelation. A few hundred slugs and I were out the front checking men clear our sewage pipe of Tiny Cacadore's nappy liners; I was thinking of what to do to take my mind off the fortune they're charging and my recent discussion with her indoors about it (didn't go well), so I picked up the vinegar to give the weeds a bashing and a few drops went on a curious slug. Nothing happend as usual and I went back to the weeds. Her indoors came out complaining about the slugs so I had another look on the path and was surprised to see most of them had gone. That's odd, I thought. I had a closer look at the slime-trail to see where they'd gone and instead of clear slime, the slime was slightly brown. And a tiny bit lumpy. That's not just slime, I thought: that's slug insides. And there they were, spending their last minutes on this globe hiding in the shade in the grass at the path edge, not enjoying things at all. Nifty.

So, inadvertantly I discovered an easy way to kill slugs and just as importantly, get them to tidy themselves up! Not too much vinegar: I don't want them dying on the path. Just a few drops so they can slither off to expire somewhere dark leaving my path looking fresh and clean. Lovely.

 

Ello

Welcome back, was wondering where you'd been

 

Hello,
Been fighting slugs