Slug Catching

Slug activity seemed to heighten around June/July time, probably compounded by the fact that we had another wet and not overly hot summer.

We’d initially tried beer traps but these were time consuming and messy and, over time, seemed to lose their effectiveness (though this may have been due to our change from half-decent lager to cheap bitter).  We we looked at other methods of catching them.

• Slug Hunting: Trips to the garden at night to hunt and kill slugs proved even more time consuming and messy than beer traps.  But great fun!
• Growing Success Slug Stop: Growing Success is a company that make organic garden products.  We were desperately trying to be organic!  And especially with poison, as we don’t want other animals consuming it and dying.  We saw that we could buy their slug defence products in two sizes, and that the bigger size was far cheaper.  So we bought that.  What we didn’t realise was that we’d bought “Slug Stop” instead of “Slug Killer”!  You put this white substance around the plants in quite large quantities, the slugs don’t like it and so they don’t crawl over it to the plants.  Only it doesn’t work at all.
• Growing Success Slug Killer: Having realised our mistake we bought some of the more expensive organic blue slug pellets, which are also safe for kids and pets.  These seemed to work better, though we weren’t sure how effective they were because we put them down at the same time as…
• NemaSlug: This is a bit freaky but these people breed nematode worms, which are natural predators against slugs.  They swim around in the soil, find slugs, bury inside them, and kill them from the inside out, reproducing as they do so.  They are all-natural, do not interfere with other wildlife, and once they’ve run out of food (slugs) they die back down to natural levels.  The nemaslug product temporarily increases the level of nematodes in the soil helping kill off the slug population.

  We gave one treatment of this late on in the season and it did really seem to help.  It’s expensive but seems to be highly effective.  Perhaps we’ll try it again next year!