Lady Mary Allotments & Cardiff Organic Gardeners

Slugs - Why fight a losing battle?

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In the battle against slugs there is no one way which will be totally effective. Even beer traps and nematode worms have only a limited success. The former because they need frequent topping up and the latter because once the slugs have been virtually eliminated there is nothing to maintain the nematodes, without slugs they die, their usual length of usefulness is about three months.

Without pests there will be no predators. As organic gardeners you will learn that without pests there will be no predators. The price of achieving a balance is that some pests will survive or the predators will move to find food elsewhere and the pests will return, therefore, no method will ever be one hundred per cent successful. So, slug control is a combination of maintaining predators combined with guile and diversion.

Success against slugs depends upon a combination of methods. It helps if you observe how slugs behave. They work at night, or at least in the dark and hide up during the day in some dark, damp place, only to foray forth in the evening to destroy our lettuces, especially when it is warm and damp. Slugs can travel large distances in the search for food leaving a trail behind them. They then follow this trail back and forth between food and shelter. Unfortunately other slugs crossing this path have the ability to tell in which direction the trail-blazer was travelling and follow it to food and shelter.

This gives us a clue to a few  methods to reduce slug damage:

Slugs are natural composters. A rather satisfying method of turning this foe to our advantage is to collect them and then put them, alive, on the compost heap! Think about it. What are they doing but converting our lettuces into compost and very efficiently too! Put them where there is a constant supply of food and you will have a happy slug doing what it does best and not bothering to roam looking for food elsewhere. But at the same time the slug predators will quickly realise that there is a bumper source of fast food and they too will congregate and do the job that they do best.

Barriers need regular replenishment and different materials to be effective. But if you can achieve a balance between slugs and predators there are other steps which allow your prized vegetables and hostas to survive. You will all know about beer traps and grit, gravel, egg shells and even salt as protective barriers. But they all only work for short spells. So rotating your systems to give variation is the answer.

A safe method of killing slugs. Keeping your barriers dry applies even more strongly to another which I have found probably the most successful - Bran. I don't know why but for some reason slugs seem to find bran unresistably attractive. Put in a ring around lettuce plants I have found as many as a dozen slugs munching happily on bran and ignoring the lettuces. But it is important that it is dry and so needs replenishing on a fairly frequent basis. The action seems to be a dual one, first the bran absorbs the moisture in the slug and then swells so that at one move it both desiccates and ruptures the slug's body, with the added virtue that creatures like hedgehogs can eat the remains safely.

It can still all go wrong! Even with all these methods if you take your holiday at the wrong time you can come home to find disaster has struck. That really goes to make my point more forcefully. It is constant attention and frequent changes to your methods that will give you the best chance. The moment that you relax your hard won control will suffer because slugs never go on holiday! You need to provide holiday cover. {:-}

Attract predators. "You don't have a slug problem. You have a shortage of hedgehogs."  Some of the attributes of a wildlife garden are the provision of suitable habitats for the larger slug predators. Establish shelters for hedgehogs and provide enticement, not bread and milk, cat and dog food are better. 

A small water feature with frogs and toads will both be a visual delight and a happy home for those slug hunters.

Provide areas of flat ground where blackbirds and especially thrushes (both soft beak ground feeders) will have good visibility and feel safe to search for food and they will also help to keep the slug population under control.

But, potentially the best warriors in our fight to control slugs are those little, fluorescent black shelled, ground beetles. Encourage them, provide areas where they can scuttle to shelter and covered pathways they can follow in their pursuit of the slug. They are also part of someone else's food chain of course so they tend to prefer lots of cover.