Slugs Give us your Top Tips

[kiskidee]

i salt em where i find em. just a few grains will do.

[hermykne]

i hate these creature and from me they get collected and bagged with bleach - i hope its a torturous death for the buggers, maynot be eco nice but i dont care they are urghhhhh

[southeastastra]

Go out as late as possible and with a spade, lob them as far away as you can. I get loads because I have two rabbits, they always get into the hutches. Where do they come from, you only see them in the rain?

[expatinscotland]

My dad's had pretty good success w/adding LOTS of crushed egg shells - he saves them up - to his mulch.

[fullmoonfiend]

allegedly coffee grounds work too. Though I will be using the Ring Of Sand approach on my alotty
(Scissors too macabre for me...though I can completely understand the feeling of WAR!)

[liath]

At the moment I am at war with the slimy little f*ckers.

Have planted lots of phlox and dianthus - allegedly slug resistant but the phlox have been decimated. Have used egg shells, bark mulch, a beer trap and copper rings. Beer trap went down yesterday and is looking promising - lots of dead floating slugs already . Don't want to use pellets as I'm convinced dd will think they are a form of raisin & eat them.

[Matonic]

I share the other posters' misgivings about pellets, but I've found that coffee grounds have had no effect, eggshell shards around the plants have no effect, and I can't count the number of times I've indulged in mass slaughter one night, only to find another invading army of slugs and snails the next night. And the next ... and the next ...

This is all in my garden, and my best solution now is to only grow plants that the slugs and snails aren't attracted to.

In the longer term, I think one solution is to attract more birds to your garden. I have very few slugs/snails at my allotment, which has a lot of birds, but very few birds in the garden because of the high cat population in the neighbourhood. So, perhaps a few nesting boxes, food out in the winter and maybe even a cat-scarer ...?

[kiskidee]

i couldn't do the scissors thing as i am way too squeamish. it made macabre reading tho!

i like the pellets in a lobster trap bottle idea.

[kiskidee]

should we start a how to get rid of cats - permanently thread then?

[catsmother]

Aren't there supposed to be something like 100 slugs per square metre. If so, guess we just see the tip of the iceberg in our gardens ?

[rosiesmumof4]

scissors, deffo. not generally violent honest

[mrspink27]

I have just returned to fledgling veg patch to discover that mr slug and his relatives have visited and feasted! I am afraid I have liberally sprinkled pellets as I am fed up with providing a gourmet restaurant for the slug population. You can get granules called Slug SToppa which are only efffective if it doesnt rain, tthe slug crawls on the granules and the slime is absorbed by them and therefore dries the slug out (yeeeeuch)! I tried nematodes last year but found it made only a small dent in the population. If you can bear to snip them/drown them or other method of killing, grapefruit and orange halves hollowed out, upturned and placed around most populated areas make great slug meeting places, and then you just come along and put an end to the slug party going on beneath the citrus. My parents in law go out with torches, bucket and scissors at dusk and snip.

[Turquoise]

Haven't had time to read the whole thread but has anyone suggested bran? My friend insists that they gorge on it and then explode - worth a try?

[merlotmama]

Have a look at \link{http://gardensnail.co.uk}

I have not found coffee grounds work, or egg shells. Apparently snails can travel over a razor blade without hurting themselves. I'm sure I've also read they have a homing instinct so chucking them over the garden wall won't work. Finding where they spend the day can help. My compost heap, which is a wooden slatted one, has them hiding on the shady side. Currently smaller snails and slugs are sleeping down the inside of hyacinth leaves. The north side of damp wood or stone is popular - you have to think like a snail!
I did get organic stuff from the garden centre which is like dry gravel which they can't cross due to lack of moisture. Worked a bit but as soon as it rains heavily (I'm in Scotland) it doesn't work.
Anyone bothered with New Zealand Flatworms? Salt and /or hot water work for them, but you have to find them first.

[southeastastra]

These cures are horrific! Poor slugs, don't any of you watch Fifi and the Flowertots? Poor Slugsy.

When I have lobbed them away I notice that they don't come back that quickly. Once I put them all in a bucket and the next morning they were all crawling out, so they stayed there all night.

Maybe put them in a bucket with lettuce to eat or leftovers? I can't help but feel sorry for the slugs, especially cutting them with scissors pure evil! Salt is also particularly nasty.

[fullmoonfiend]

LOL at the thought of exploding slugs

[MrsLee]

Frogs and headgehogs eat slugs dont they? maybe try getting some of them in your garden to eat them all up, or do what i do and go out late at night armed with the table salt and just put rings around them so they cant get out unless they burn.. bit crule maybe but is quite funny

[southeastastra]

I am now getting v upset about the cruelty shown to slugs at least when I chuck them they have a 5050 chance of survival