It's the rainy season for many of you. With some unseasonably warm temperatures up north, it's the rainy season for more gardeners than usual. And with rain comes snails and slugs. Yuck! Like deer and free plants, slugs are a never ending source of befuddlement. The quest for a non-toxic slug control goes on. You may recall that I stopped using beer when my neighbor's dog began using my garden as her neighborhood drinking hole.
The last time I asked for suggestions, a couple of you recommended a product called "Sluggo". Unlike other slug controls that use Metaldehyde, Sluggo's active ingredient is iron phosphate, which is labeled safe to use near kids, pets and around edible plants. I tried it and I thought it did a pretty decent job for me this summer.
If you're entering your slimy season, here's the list of slug control suggestions, so far. Please, please feel free to add your suggestions or comments. I'm sure there's a purpose for snails and slugs somewhere, but not in my garden.
Photo: © Marie Iannotti
Comments
Sluggo does work great for those slimey slugs and is organic. I use Sluggo Plus which works not only on slugs and snails it also works great on nasty earwigs and cutworms. I have put it in my containter gardens for both slugs and earwigs. Sluggo Plus has a natural good bacteria in it called Spinosad.
Iron Phosphate is available from several sources including Sluggo, Bonide and Ortho. Sluggo Plus with spinosad which is also a low toxicity insect control offers good control.
It’s important though to realize that organic or not, these products are designed to kill a target pest. The low toxicity and natural (iron phosphate is not organic, it’s natural) nomenclature do not relieve the user of reading, understanding and following the label directions for these products.
Critical issue here is simple: “Organic is not the same thing as Safe!”
BD
I have heard of people using copper wire as a deterrent. I myself have never tried this, but I’ve heard this works. For instance, you could add some copper wire at the base of the stem or around the garden boxes. I’m sure you could get artistic with it.
I’ve used an organic, non-toxic product called DIATOMACEOUS EARTH. It comes in the form of pellets, the pellets are white chalk-like and is produced by the crushing of fossilized algae. I spread the pellets heavily, almost coating the ground. The slugs crawl over the pellets and it works as an abrasive to their body and eventually dries them out.
I agree with the Bug Doc—Don’t kill the bugs.
We need the bad bugs for the good bugs to eat. Learn to live with them and put a little salt in a spray bottle and add water. Spray where you don’t want them. Rarely will they cross over a salt water line.
If you have chickens running around i dont want them to eat any poison pellets
Copper does work on slugs. It creates an electrical reaction with the slug, in plain English, it shocks him. They don’t like to be shocked anymore than we do, so they won’t cross the copper.
Salt water and rubbing alcohol are two other ways to get rid of slugs. They congeal a slug’s slime coat so he crawls right out of his slime trail. Dead slug.
(A small note on my comment. I am not being sexist by using the words “he” and “his”. It has just been my experience that the word “slug” has always been used to describe some men, not women.)
I’m not offended, but the Slug Anti-Defamation League (SAD) may be in touch with you soon.
(I just realized that if there really were such a league, we’d all be in a lot of trouble.)
you can use any piece of board. get it wet and place it in the garden for one week. After a week turn over the board and scrap all of the slugs into a 5 gallon bucket. and repeat as needed. No chemicals in my garden.
I save all my eggshells crush them up and spread them around he edges of my vegatable garden. They dont like the rough edges of the shells, but you do have to reapply during the growing season as the shells tnd to sink into the dirt when harvesting.
i use sluggo in my almost woodland garden. it’s the only solution for snails and slugs.
All of my irises got eaten up by slugs or snails or something, but I never saw them on top of the ground, only when I dug up the dead plant they were all through the tubers. How can I take care of them when they are in the ground?
Slugs don’t usually go underground to munch. It’s more likely your iris were eaten by either voles or iris borers.
Voles may chew the entire rhizome. Borers tend to tunnel through the rhizome. Here’s a good article on spotting and controlling borers.
When I moved to my present address seven years ago, I noticed finger thick and long snails in my yard. I was horrified, but realized that snails that big thrived on the grounds of the university a few blocks away. Recently I have noticed that the biology department is raising and studying them. Also, I have been disposing of pine kitty litter in several places around my garden as fertilizer /mulch and havn’t seen any since. Maybe the acid in the urine and feces irritates their skin, or maybe it is the odor:)
not a good idea to dispose of kitty litter in the garden pet litter contains parasites that can contaminate your harvest or get trampled back into your house on your shoes or fingers of little ones.
How about a shallow dish with a little beer? The beer is supposed to attract the snails and slugs which then drown. Works for me.
How about using NATURE TO BATTLE NATURE? I have had great success using cut up raspberry branches, on the soil in triangular formations around the base of individual plants. For the backyard gardener its simple, reusable and effective.
BrainD, that’s a clever suggestion. But I would caution people to be careful about using thorny branches where you weed or kneel. I can attest to that first hand.