I love to share the spoils of my Grow Your Own adventures with family and friends.
After all, GYO is about more than the utilitarian need to put food on our table. It’s about reconnecting with the luxurious abundance of the natural world and delighting in the gifts of nature; it’s about nourishing body, soul and community every time we sit down and share the best food money can’t buy with people we care about; it’s about wresting control of the food system back from agri-industry and learning how to fend for ourselves a little better.
So whether it’s making a raft of rhubarb crumble muffins from the rhubarb patch at the end of the garden, converting friends to the delights of wild-crafted herby salads or handing out jars of our pickled red cabbage, sharing feels good.
But there’s one living thing with which I do not want to share - slugs.
Now I’m sure that slugs have a very important role in the divine plan. I know they feed on dead and rotting materials and are part of nature’s waste management system. But I can’t help but feel there’s been a bit of mission drift.
My newly germinated kale, for example, is far from dead and rotting - it’s not even slightly stressed - and yet the local slugs seem to be using it like a pop-up restaurant. Wherever you go in my garden, you are never more than 10cm away from one of these gastropods. ‘Gastropod’ comes from the Greek words for ‘stomach foot’ - and there’s no doubt about it, the army of slugs in my garden definitely marches on its stomach.
Unless you live on a remote island surrounded by a wall of copper, egg shells and coffee grounds, I expect you have slug issues too. And with these wet and ever-so-slightly-warm summers, slugs may just end up being your best harvest ever.
So how do you deal with these little pests?
As an organic gardener, I’ve tried many of the recommended methods (except for slug pellets) and I have to say none of them are 100% foolproof, but some definitely help reduce the numbers of ravaging hordes.
Here are my top tips:
1. Slugs love the dark and the damp. If you’re someone who doesn’t mind picking them off by hand, put out a large, flat stone or piece of cardboard in the evening and the next day just collect all the slugs that have gathered there to sleep off a night of gorging - only don’t forget to collect, otherwise you’re just offering B&B to your slug community.
2. I know it’s hard if it’s bucketing down outside, but on a dry day if you are watering, try and do it in the morning - keeping the ground dry later in the day makes slugs a little less eager to go out and eat from the smorgasbord of your newly planted lettuce.
3. Introduce predators. Frogs, toads, slowworms, hedgehogs, beetles and centipedes are natural predators that relish a nice juicy slug (or slug egg). By designing your growing area so that it is wildlife friendly, you can encourage these beneficial predators to give a helping hand. Tadpoles apparently love them. Other slightly larger predators include ducks (they love slugs and don’t mess up your garden so much as paddle it to death). Much smaller predators are the nematodes – the extremely expensive biological method that uses microscopically small worms to parasitise slugs. Nematodes are extremely effective, but (1) I couldn’t afford to use it on the whole of my garden and (2) they are so effective that they can wipe out the slug population, meaning all those other helpful predators species go elsewhere for better pickings, leaving you open for a full-on slug invasion once the nematodes have died off. Use them on slug hotspots to get the best effect.
4. Use barrier methods. A heavy ring of coffee grounds, eggshells, grit, wood ash – anything rough and uncomfortable to slide over is supposed to work well. I’ve never had any success with barrier methods – not even the much vaunted (and very costly) copper rings. I once thought I was getting somewhere with a thick application of wheat bran (organic of course) around my day lily – the slugs are meant to like the bran even more than they like green leaves. Then it expands inside them and they turn their toe up. In a dry summer, this can work okay, but in a typical Scottish summer, the bran just gets washed into the soil. Barrier methods and Scotland just don’t seem to mix.
5. Distract them with alcohol. I’ve tried grapefruit halves filled with Guinness, bought-in beer traps with a labyrinth of tunnels through to the alcoholic nirvana and home-made versions upcycled from plastic bottles. I can only conclude that the slugs in my garden are seasoned drinkers, because I’ve never had a drowned one yet – beetles and bugs and butterflies, yes; slugs, no.
6. Be brave and despatch them yourself. Apologies to any animal liberationists, but with all except the barrier methods, most techniques for slug control end up with a slug that is no more. Rather than delegate to nematodes, ducks or wildlife, some gardeners end up doing the deed themselves.
Good luck with your slug management systems this week!
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