Slug Wars: A New Hope

[gtarman]

Cleverest thread title ever, eh?

Anywho I recently compiled a lit of my learnings in the battle against slugs to help out another SABer, as I've had quite some success against the slimy buggers lately. I thought I may as well upload it here as some folks might be interested and find it useful....just copied and pasted.

1. Keep your egg shells and let them dry out, then crush them up and spread them around the base of your plants.

2. A good sprinkling of diatomaceous earth along with the egg shells makes a more or less slug-proof physical barrier, that they can't cross without being shredded.

3. With beer traps, a good trick is to use the darkest natural ale you can find - I like Coopers Stout, as it's bottle conditioned, so along with having heaps of malt in it, it also still has the yeast and whatnot...both are cocaine to slugs. The other half of the good trick is to tip a little bit extra yeast (baking yeast) into each trap, and spread a little around the trap so they can find it like a trail of breadcrumbs.

4. Surprisingly, apparently spraying your plants and the immediate area with a caffeine solution also causes slugs and snails to stay away. I forget why, but it definitely had a scientific basis.

5. Another novel technique is to get a copper pipe and bend it into a circle-barrier around the base of your plant. Snails and slugs have stuff in their skin and slime that reacts with copper causing them to get an electrical shock when they come in contact with it. But it stops working if the copper becomes tarnished.

Other thing I found useful - the plant that was affected, I put the pot to soak in a tub filled with about 3 inches of very warm (almost hot) water and then proceeded to give it a good watering from above with the same temp water from a watering can.

Then I left it there for to soak for a good 40 minutes to an hour, and when I came back about 11 slugs had crawled out of their hiding places in the pot to escape the warm water, and I disposed of them. Haven't had any slug problems with that plant since (although that's in combination with some of the above continuous precautions).

Hope that helps somebody out

[Sallubrious]

I've found that egg shells don't stop snails or slugs, I've found snail trails over the top of the eggshells and I've even caught them in the act of of crossing the egg shells. I still use egg shell in the garden though but it's for calcium and it also adds a few other nutrients.

The coffee works well, and diatomaceous earth does to a certain extent, but if it gets wet or damp from dew overnight it loses its effectiveness.

Edited November 15, 2013 by Sally

[gtarman]

Yeah, I'm not sure. Might be a matter of how dry they (the eggshells) are and the shape and size of the particles/how finely they're crushed. Worst case though your plant gets some slow-release calcium

Edited November 14, 2013 by gtarman

[Leaves]

Cinnamon powder, they & just about everything hates it, fungus included.

[gtarman]

Nice. Yeah I used to use that to keep ants off of plants by spraying a ring around the outside of the pot or trunk of a tree then dusting on cinnamon, which would stick to it and form a barrier that kept the ants off.

[bogfrog]

Sweet I think I'll go home and launch an attack. Those fuckers have been targeting my absolute favourite plants and I've had enough of that.

Here comes the cinnamon fairy... Think I'll add a bit of salt to my fairy dust just to spite them. That'll teach u to eat my prized possessions, slimey bastards

[AnthromorphicGerbil]

If there's silver trails in your garden bed..... Who you gonna call? SLIME BUSTERS!!

[GoOnThen]

Snails and slugs have been shocking here this year. My Pere mothers are just sticks not a leaf to be seen. Most of my Trichs have got some damage to there tips.

The worst has been this Mammillaria bocasana it had snails and slugs living down inside it and they munched there way from the inside out which caused rot. I have lost over half of this plant. One complete side has gone. I new it was happening but couldn't get in there to get rid of them. I have recently started spraying it with copper as I can now spray in from the side with all of the damage.

Little slimey bastards.

Cheers

Got

Edited November 15, 2013 by GoOnThen

[gtarman]

Sweet I think I'll go home and launch an attack. Those fuckers have been targeting my absolute favourite plants and I've had enough of that.

Here comes the cinnamon fairy... Think I'll add a bit of salt to my fairy dust just to spite them. That'll teach u to eat my prized possessions, slimey bastards

I'd be careful with salt, or you might do your plants in as well :-/

[bogfrog]

I didn't use the salt in the pots just a line along the edges of the tables.

Gave the cinnamon a good sprinkle though, will report back if it seems to make a difference.

My greenhouse now smells like freshly baked cinnamon cookies

[terracottacactus]

Cleverest thread title ever, eh?

Maybe when we find a final cure for them we can change the title to slug wars: the gardener strikes back.

[Leaves]

I used to get free 5kg bags of powdered pepper from spice masters & that stuff works well for lots of pests but drives off some of the good guys also. I have a problem with moist soil seeking toads digging up my seedlings but people in the past introduced toads into their greenhouses to eat snails & slugs, I have no slugs in sight this year so if you can find some of the smaller toads around try moving them in & keep the delicate plants/seedlings up somewhere the toads can't reach.

Edited November 15, 2013 by Leaves

[psyspasm]

set up some beer traps today, really hope it knocks em down a peg or 2, starting to make quite a meal of all my bridgey tips and new pups

[solaritea]

Don't forget manual control. Go out in the early night with a flashlight and pick and stomp.

[psyspasm]

set up beer traps yesterday for the first time.. came out this morning and already about 8-10 floaters pretty happy with the results, bridgesii fueled monster snails too, these suckers mean business..

[gtarman]

^^ they work hey. I bring in about 5+ slugs per trap per night pretty consistently. Makes me wonder where the hell they're all coming from. Maybe from a garden far, far away lol

*killing it on the Star Wars references*

[gtarman]

Don't forget manual control. Go out in the early night with a flashlight and pick and stomp.

Nice one, and recommended. I just had a midnight urge to garden, so I went down and checked my slug traps. The fuckers were everywhere, all around my chive plants and whatnot. And way more than what usually end up in the traps. So I sat there with my torch, and I helped them find the traps. Which basically means I just picked them up with sticks and dropped them into the beer, and knocked the ones into the beer who were being smart and hanging on to the edges of the traps.

My slug kill ratio just went way up

[bogfrog]

Cinnamon doesn't seem to be making a difference for me, and I was pretty liberal with it.

Need to buy some more beer. That's been the most effective approach IME.

Every trap usually kills 5-6 slugs per night. It looks really foul after a couple days though

[Leaves]

If you water from a hose or can the cinnamon just washes away, it works just like talc, which works also. I get 5kg bags of spices so I use quite a bit, high enough they cannot climb over the line. I use the cinnamon for ants all the time & for slugs (if with pot plants) the slugs are always hiding just under the pot around the drainage holes so I just grab them a throw them next door.

Edited November 22, 2013 by Leaves

[gtarman]

Every trap usually kills 5-6 slugs per night. It looks really foul after a couple days though

Yes, yes it does. After 3 nights (and my little black ops slug strike last night) each trap has about 30+ slugs in it, and they've started growing a thin film of white slime on top