The only good slug is a dead slug ☠️

greyteam1959

Nematodes are very expensive and about useless as they are very temperature critical.
I am plagued with slugs all year round if I did not use metaldehyde slug pellets I would have bare soil !!
I have tried all the weird and wonderful internet remedies & they are without fail a waste if time and effort.

Davesnave

I've used nematodes for vine weevils and they were very effective, applied at the right temperatures. As I understand it, one big lab produces the 'todes and then third parties sell them on, hence not much variation in price.

They do  require a leap of faith; I mean, who counts theirs? !

silverwhistle

Clay soil and a slug and snail problem too. In my back garden I do the night time torch excursions method, no re-homing here either. Another successful method for at least cutting numbers are slug traps. I occasionally go down to a regular pub with an ex-lemonade plastic 2l bottle and a funnel (make it easy for them) and get some beer slops. Plenty of containers available in most households - particularly good are those ricotta and mascarpone containers with slopey, slippery sides..

andygb

Chalky soil in my area and loads of snails and slugs, despite having lots of wildlife - foxes, rabbits, hedgehogs, loads of different birds. Lost nearly all the dahlias in the front garden last year. Tried pellets, shingle, eggshell, will try cheap beer from Lidl this year.

DiggerUK

andygb said: will try cheap beer from Lidl this year.

I know slugs can get the best of us down, but turning up at AA as a result of a slug problem is desperate..._

forgotmyname

Midnight raids in the garden equipped with a £3 headtorch and a bucket of salty water.  Works wonders.

Do that 3 nights in a row and you will barely find any. Either the  ones you missed spread the word and they
all escaped to safer pastures or you only caught the stupid ones. The ones you missed are the Ninja's
of the slug and snail world.

silverwhistle

Wait until the first rains and they'll be out going 'Mwahahaha'..

It's what I do, although tend to shove them down the outside loo along with the beer trap victims. But I've got a new allotment and that introduces logistical problems.. Still, I could just claim that I was socially distancing..

Green_hopeful

You are not going to like this but only the little grey slugs and larger black keel slugs really eat your living plants. The rest are mostly beneficial either eating dead stuff or other slugs. We have a couple of ducks and they eat the slugs they find. We grow great hostas with no slug issues. Slug pellets are nasty chemicals which persist in the environment. 

Davesnave

Green_hopeful said:

You are not going to like this but only the little grey slugs and larger black keel slugs really eat your living plants......Slug pellets are nasty chemicals which persist in the environment. 

Why won't people 'like' that? If the only slugs that ate plants were pink and green with yellow spots, would it make any difference if they were roaming freely? While slug pellets may be environmentally damaging, that would also apply to growing a food crop and wasting a good part of it; the implication being that a greater acreage would be needed for the same quantity of crop. A large proportion of slug pellet use is by farmers, not the home gardener, who should know that the latest research shows many alternative remedies are ineffective:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/27/slugs-have-won-rhs-says-landmark-study-shows-no-home-remedies/

Ducks are messy things that eat more plants than snails and sh_t everywhere, so one doesn't find many in RHS gardens, or indeed in tiny suburban back gardens, which is probably good news for intelligent creatures like them.

Hopefully when he has finished saving humanity with a new shot for C'rona, Bill Gates will turn to finding a cure for slugs; probably one that will work well for a few years before mysteriously becoming corrupted and useless, requiring users to buy an improved version.....

MoneySeeker1

forgotmyname said:

Midnight raids in the garden equipped with a £3 headtorch and a bucket of salty water.  Works wonders.

Do that 3 nights in a row and you will barely find any. Either the  ones you missed spread the word and they
all escaped to safer pastures or you only caught the stupid ones. The ones you missed are the Ninja's
of the slug and snail world.

Thinks - reading this with interest and wondering about "midnight raids" as you put it.

Just how dark do slugs like it? Would around 9pm/10pm be dark enough for their tastes?

Let's hope I could get to them fast enough before they'd all been scared off by the fact I've now got security lights set up to come on/stay on when movement is detected....

As for them liking rain - no shortage of that here (unfortunately) - so I guess daytimes after latest bout of rain is also "happy hunting hour"...