Organic Vegetable Gardening
Organic Vegetable Gardening: What To Do About Slugs
Conventional gardeners put out slug pellets, but if you are pursuing the path of organic vegetable gardening you will need new ways to deal with slugs. Here are just a few of the best.
1. If You Do Not Want To Kill Them
- Find out which of your plants slugs particularly like, and grow them in raised beds or in containers. It is best if the walls of your raised beds are brick and your containers are terracotta or something similar, which slugs do not like climbing. Do not use wood.
- Collect them either in jars or by leaving a bucket or a piece of plastic or old carpet in a damp grassy area. Slugs need to stay in damp conditions or they will dehydrate and die, so they will gather underneath whatever you leave out. You can then remove them to a slug-friendly environment far away from your garden.
- Cut the tops and bottoms off soda bottles. You then have plastic cylinders that you can push into the ground around individual plants, to protect them.
- Grow plants that slugs do not like around the ones they do like. Most strong smelling herbs will keep slugs away, including mint, chives, sage, fennel, lavender and garlic. They will have no idea there is a lovely crop of lettuces inside that ring of smelly plants.
- Put a barrier of eggshells, sand, crushed sea shells, wood ash or coffee grounds around your plants. Be prepared to keep replacing the barrier as it is washed away by rain or your watering.
- Keep a pet hedgehog. Feed hedgehogs with dog food (not bread and milk which is bad for them) and provide them with a waterproof box to live in, hidden under vegetation and filled with straw.
- Have frogs and toads around your pond.
- Keep the garden so tidy that there is nowhere for slugs to hide. All plants will need to have space around them and you will want plants that grow upward rather than covering the ground. Then to reach your plants the slugs will have to be exposed to their predators, mainly birds.
- If you keep the soil well tilled and hoed, this will also keep slugs off. They don't like fine grainy soil that moves when they try to slither over it, they prefer big hard clumps of earth.
2. If You Do Not Mind Killing Them
- Set beer traps. Take a glass jar, pour a little beer into it and leave it on its side in the garden. You should find plenty of drowned slugs the next morning.
- Hunt them at night with a flashlight or collect them under a piece of plastic as described earlier. Destroy. You can feed them to chickens, squish them or drown them in a rain butt or pond. If you squish them, do it near to the plants as a warning to keep other slugs away.
You can also buy organic slug pellets and other poisons. However, although the pellets are said to be safe for pets and wildlife, there is some debate about whether they are harmful to the birds and hedgehogs that will eat the poisoned slugs. As you can see there are plenty of wildlife friendly methods that are cheaper too. So there is no need to use any kind of poison to kill slugs in organic vegetable gardening.
Video of the Day
Organic gardening: How to grow an organic vegetable garden
Organic Vegetable Gardening Auctions of Interest
Ends in 9 Days 9 Hours 50 Minutes 14 Seconds
Current price: $19.99 (1 bid)
Ends in 2 Hours 59 Minutes 26 Seconds
Current price: $15.50 (1 bid)
Ends in 26 Days 4 Hours 19 Minutes 56 Seconds
Current price: $11.60 (2 bids)
Ends in 11 Hours 39 Minutes 27 Seconds
Current price: $5.98 (0 bids)
Ends in 28 Days 1 Hours 23 Minutes
Current price: $6.09 (0 bids)
Ends in 29 Days 1 Hours 40 Minutes 42 Seconds
Current price: $46.98 (0 bids)
Ends in 1 Days 10 Hours 27 Minutes 6 Seconds
Current price: $0.99 (0 bids)
Ends in 26 Days 21 Hours 28 Minutes 9 Seconds
Current price: $6.00 (0 bids)
Ends in 1 Days 10 Hours 31 Minutes 12 Seconds
Current price: $15.50 (0 bids)
Ends in 26 Days 8 Hours 19 Seconds
Current price: $5.15 (0 bids)
Sponsors