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Slugs and Snails
Dolly11
Posts: 14
What is a cheap way of getting rid of Slugs and Snail. (l do find many Snails have been eaten) l have tried most things.
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Posts
Encouraging birds, beetles, frogs and hedgehogs Beer traps work too, but it's a terrible waste of beer!
With the lung worm about getting rid of slugs is my objective this month as we have 2 dogs that insist on eating anything and everything in sight. We have ordered some meds off Amazon so they will soon be protected.
Copper tape is supposed to be good and we are about to research the bugs that prey on slugs - yuck
Thank you for your comments.
Copper tape does help around the hosta pots, using nematodes is good but a) very hard work, and b) nature abhors a vacuum, so all the neighbours slugs and snails come in once they realise ours had died!! The organic pellets help a bit, but in the end we have to realise that we do share our gardens with all other living things - and sadly that includes slugs and snails. I wonder if we would like ladybirds as much as most of us do, were they a different colour and pattern?
Try Slug Clear.Its a concentrate and you put it in water.Think its 30mls to 2 gallons.Water it all over the vunerable plants (I use it for Hostas) and then it dries so now harm to pets.Last for several weeks and it works.Homebase sell it and larger garden centres.
I have a major infestation! I squashed 100s in the last few days. I go out in the morning & lift them & then again in the evening, but one day I even went out in the dark at midnight & got about 100, and that was after two major collections earlier! In fairness they've been kept at bay, possibly cuz it's been so dry, but my focus has been on my veg patch. My flowers have been munched to the ground! I've just ordered nemaslug from Amazon, cuz I've loads of stuff to go in the ground, but I'm afraid the slugs will have it all stripped before I can get enough coffee grounds to protect them. Have to say, coffee grounds are the most effective thing I've used next to ash from the fire. The benefit of coffee grounds is that they'll fertilize the soil, where the ash won't unless it's pure wood ash. The drawback of coffee grounds is that it can form an impenetrable barrier that hinders water getting to the plant.
Dolly, if you're finding that quite a lot of snails have been eaten, please don't even think about any kind of poison. I have no hedgehogs (apart from my three rescues that I adopted yesterday) and the Song Thrushes have been missing for many years. It's a vicious circle, people poison slugs, slug predators die so there are no predators to eat the slugs so more slugs, more poison ..... I use physical barriers as suggested above and I've given up on hostas etc!