My new vegetables are being decimated by slugs! I went out this evening and hand picked off a few small ones. I found some potential natural solutions for slug control at eartheasy.com
Eartheasy mentions two solutions which are very doable for me: seawood and coffee. We are near the ocean so I plan to take a trip to the beach to gather some seaweed. It will be really stinky, but the salt in the seawood is supposedly enough to repel them. Another natural solution is coffee. I just went off coffee due to stomach problems, so this is a great way to use up my remaining coffee stash.
I read here at gardenweb that spraying ammonia onto the area helps, and iron phosphate slug bait, AKA Sluggo
which is non-toxic.The ones we have are the long giant brown spotted ones. They are really creepy looking, and are best seen at night with a flashlight along our foundation. I'll try to get a picture of them - ours are so huge they look like alien slugs. Shivers!
8 comments:
If you can bribe...er...convince littles to help collect them, they are supposed to be wonderful in compost piles....not that I would want to touch them, but really, people pay big bucks for the kind of composting those little critters do....
So if you have a compost pile they should be very happy eating at that all you can eat buffet and not wander out to your tender veggies.
And if it makes you feel better, here I am fighting with snails!
We have slugs too! I've tried beer which they drown in. But the best thing to do is buy the slug pellets sold in the walmart garden center. sprinkle around every now and then. But, might not be safe around your kids. don't know about that. I hate slugs. the long ones look like snakes.
If you don't mind killing them, setting out a bowl of beer, I had to go buy a cheap six pack, next to the plants they like will pull them all in. They will drown and you can dump the beer and dead snails into your compost. It worked appallingly well for me. I felt quite bad when I saw the heaping bowl full of drowned snails, you couldn't have crammed another one in.
I have never had a problem with slugs, but eggshells might work. Coffee can lead to bloom end rot.
http://agardenofblessings.blogspot.com/2008/04/using-eggshells.html
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll check out your link Candace. :)
Where did you get that marvelous slug poster? We just had a slug day outside - mommies and babies and I know nothing about them. It would be great to have a poster to identify them.
I wish I could remember, but I'm pretty sure it is in public domain. It may have come of Wikipedia.
For some reason our slug problem is much better this year. I'm wondering if it was our neighbors with all the junk in their backyard. They moved, and flippers bought the house. It's all cleaned up now, and no big slugs.
I saw the slug pic on Wiki. I'm new to using images off the web and get a little confused when I read the rules regarding images on Wikipedia's website. If a pic is public domain, do you know what I need to do to use it? Can I download it, can I print it, can I link to it?
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