What are you guys doing with all these slugs?

Orange_King

The slugs have got to be more plentiful this year in my garden than ever before. I'm out morning and evening to get as many as i can and have a dedicated pair of scissors which is very effective.

I also use the pellets which does mop up a lot of them too but it leaves a right sticky mess sometimes. Have considered putting them in the compost bin but I don't like the idea of them over running the place with more baby slugs so reducing the numbers is the way to go.

cyclonebri1

C_Mababejive wrote: »

Why is it that farmers can plant huge fields of produce and be fairly confident of harvesting most of it? What do they know that we dont?

Because they use some pretty noxious treatments that aren't trusted into the hands of joe bloggs for obvious reasons;)

Leif

ed110220 wrote: »

At the risk of sounding unnecessarily cruel, I've found that if a slug is somewhere inconvenient for squashing, sticking a sharp twig through it proves fatal.

Insufficiently cruel in my book. (I should point out that I am not a psychopath, merely someone who has met too many slugs for his liking.)

cyclonebri1

Nearly ruptured meself once with these slimy barstewards, stamped on 1 coming down the slope from the garden, left leg ended up2 yards away,;)

totallybonkers

What do slugs actually eat apart from plants? We only reallly have a lawn in our garden and I presume they don't favour grass when our neighbour has a huge vegetable plot? Although everynight when I put wet cat food out for our cat his dish is full of huge slugs..are they eating it? Getting a bit bored now of knocking them off to wash it out.

lostinrates

totallybonkers wrote: »

What do slugs actually eat apart from plants? We only reallly have a lawn in our garden and I presume they don't favour grass when our neighbour has a huge vegetable plot? Although everynight when I put wet cat food out for our cat his dish is full of huge slugs..are they eating it? Getting a bit bored now of knocking them off to wash it out.

Dog poo.

And yes, cat and dog food. Decaying matter.

RuthnJasper

One solution is to encourage a hedgehog to take up residence in your garden. It is a fallacy that hedgehogs' main diet is slugs, but they can and DO eat them.

When I lived with my parents, I encouraged a regular visiting hedgehog by offering him tinned cat food (N.B. Do NOT put out bread and milk or dog food - it can kill them). This, and a ready supply of water from next-door's shallow pond encouraged him to move into a sheltered corner, behind the compost-heap, under my mum's clematis. And her subsequently slug-free (without the aid of pellets/chemicals) Hostas have thrived and are beautiful. I repeated this tactic now that I have my own little house and garden, with similar happy results.

Alas, the original Hedgepig became one of the late Jasper's several nemeses - more details on his blog (link on the left under my user-name, headed "Visit RuthnJasper's Homepage!") - but the well-fed hedgehog could always out-run him...!

ed110220

totallybonkers wrote: »

What do slugs actually eat apart from plants? We only reallly have a lawn in our garden and I presume they don't favour grass when our neighbour has a huge vegetable plot? Although everynight when I put wet cat food out for our cat his dish is full of huge slugs..are they eating it? Getting a bit bored now of knocking them off to wash it out.

They eat all sorts of things. Apart from live plants they'll eat dead and decaying material, snails will eat paper and cardboard (not sure if slugs will) and even other dead slugs. If you kill a slug, others will often come out to eat its corpse. I see a lot on the lawn after rain or on moist evenings, so I presume they eat grass or grass clippings and other detritus there.

cyclonebri1

RuthnJasper wrote: »

One solution is to encourage a hedgehog to take up residence in your garden. It is a fallacy that hedgehogs' main diet is slugs, but they can and DO eat them.

)

Her we go round the mulberry bush, mul.....:D:D:D:D:D

To add, slugs do eat grass, dropped some lawn clippings the other day and put pellets round them as a test.
Unless they came out for the pellets I nabbed six going for the grass.:D

lostinrates

Slug feature on gardeners world tonight. Maybe they have the answer!