Slug/snail success stories?

peter_the_piper

I'm afraid that its pellets for me but I believe that a ring of vaseline on the top of pots works, providing the leaves do not touch other pots. They can't climb over vaseline. There's nothing like the sound of a falling slug shouting "Oh sh*t, its vaseline again.":rotfl:

savemoney

Copper tape doesn't work tried then seen slugs go over it. I mainly use pellets but as little as I can get away with

greyteam1959

I use loads of metaldehyde pellets on my garden every year without them I would have no veg plants at all.
The ferrous sulphate pellets are no where near as effective.
Tried nematodes a couple of time but they are very expensive & have a limited success when conditions are cold.
Which for me is most of the year.
I like the sound of the garlic spray........
Anybody got the actual 'recipe' for it ??

Eenymeeny

greyteam1959 wrote: »

I use loads of metaldehyde pellets on my garden every year without them I would have no veg plants at all.
The ferrous sulphate pellets are no where near as effective.
Tried nematodes a couple of time but they are very expensive & have a limited success when conditions are cold.
Which for me is most of the year.
I like the sound of the garlic spray........
Anybody got the actual 'recipe' for it ??

Lots of recipes and advococates of the garlic slug wash online. I just put a tablespoonful of lazy garlic into a litre bottle with hot water then left it until I needed it. You need to sieve it if you're using it in a spray bottle so that it doesn't block the spray. Apparently people are diluting it a lot more than I did (only 1 tablespoon to a gallon where I used it neat!) I found the Vaseline around the containers helped too. It was the spraying as soon as the points appear that caught my attention. I suppose if the surrounding area smells they may avoid it altogether!

MrsSnail

I tried nematodes last year and had mixed success - almost no impact on my raised beds but very good in the borders in the front garden. I won't be using them again as they're too expensive to keep reapplying every 6 weeks across my entire garden.

I use a garlic spray (mashed up garlic and water, leave it to sit for a week or two and then strain into a spray bottle) in the greenhouse and also wool pellets - which are expensive hence why I only use them in the greenhouse.

Year before last, I had fun with polenta flour instead of beer traps - a coupe of dozen empty glass jars on their side, each with a couple of tablespoons of polenta in them. Slugs eat the polenta, which absorbs a lot of moisture inside them, puffs up and kills them by clogging up their innards. Utterly heinous to clean up because of the slime, and definitely too labour intensive for me to repeat garden-wide, but very effective, cheap, and organic. I ended up deploying this method in the raised beds last year as well, once I realised the nematodes weren't doing much. A friend of mine in a slightly less rainy area of the country puts polenta straight onto the soil around her vulnerable plants.

I do have copper tape on my pots but I'm not sure how effective that is, I always have a second tier of protection in the soil too - old coffee grounds and squashed up eggshells. My brother-in-law swears by two rings of tape, about 1/2 inch apart, which apparently creates a more potent electric shock when a slug touches both circuits.

Unfortunately, the most effective way I've found is the one that gets you busy at bedtime - a torchlit patrol with a small bucket of strong saltwater to drown them in - I use old kilo-size yogurt pots with lids, seal them in for a couple of days, then tip the resulting slug deaths into the grid on the street.