Slugs - how are you coping?
As the title says. If you're in the UK at the moment then you will invariably have a slug fest issue. The weather has been perfect for them to go crazy breeding.
I'm posting this under home improvement, I need to remove these pests to improve my home. They're starting to climb the house to get to the moist areas of damp located in the far roof section, and I'm in a decent sized semi-detached.
We started with salt around the house regularly, that has helped. My veggie patch is under attack. I've tried the copper wire and tape - there are trails across it as they don't care. Yesterday, 8 beer traps arrived. I set them up, however I didn't have any beer and opted for cider and white wine. In case you are trying this, slugs don't seem to be affected by a splash of Pinot Grigio, so don't bother. However, the cider traps had double digits in both. Tonight, the same 8 traps are out with cider and after a walk around the garden, I can see they like it a lot. However, there are still hundreds of the bastard things out there.
What are your proven methods to fend the mollusks off? Trap or pellet? Do you hunt them down and melt them in a bucket? Help!
Reporting from the frontlines in northern rural UK. The slugs have been declared public enemy number one, as they have gone on the offensive this year and have claimed countless lives. Our entire squadron of carrots were destroyed almost immediately after deployment. They were the lucky ones. The Cabbage unit has been continuously eaten at just below the rate of maintenance. They are slowly getting larger, but each new leaf is eaten overnight eaving only a slimy muched stem the next day. The beans are growing faster than the slugs can munch, for now... The onions, though unpopular, are still being eaten, although not enough to seriously hinder their growth.
Far too many peppers (and chillis) have been munched through, although the ones in the greenhouse are fairing slightly better.
The lettuce is doing remarkably well, but I think that's just because it's growing faster than even the slugs can eat. The broccolis are one bad day away from being no more.
So far, in our entire force, only the tomatoes have resisted being eaten. It seems the slugs are entirely uninterested. I thought that the potatoes, being reasonably close relatives, would also be safe, but alas they also bare the telltale signs of war.
This is my first year growing as many crops as I've grown, so I can't say if the slugs this year are worse than previous years, but it certainly feels like the situation couldn't get much worse. In terms of home invasion, I've yet to find a slug indoors although I have seen a trail on the carpet.
I watched a YouTube video of sombody else dealing with their slug infestation, and he used beer traps and a bright torch a bucket of salty water. The comments suggested using a bucket of hot water instead, so that the slug corpses can be left out for the more desirable nightlife, birds, or be put in the compost (where they belong). Slug pellets, though expensive and inefficient (?), may help younger plants get off their feet and help them start growing faster than they can be eaten. I've also heard crushed eggskeys may help, althiigh I'm not sure on that. At the very worst they'll provide some nutrients for the soil. But to be honest, I can't help but feel like it's a bit of a lost cause this year. Between the slugs and the birds eating my brussels, I'll be overjoyed if I can even get half a crop this year.
Like OP, I eagerly await backup as we're close to being overwhelmed out here. I really hate those little guys. I know they play a very important role in the ecosystem, but to be honest, if I could monkey paw them away, I'd do it in a heartbeat, even if it meant the total and inevitable collapse of the entire ecosystem, just to spite them.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of slugs. Maybe a raised bed fortress and a salt moat are in order?
At least you can fight slugs though. My garden isn’t doing much because we had a very cold June and now a bonkers hot July, I think the plants are just confused. The only thing thriving is our kale and our garlic, everything else has barely grown. And for us, the heat brings the arrival of white moths who basically end our ability to eat the kale because they lay thousands of eggs in the leaves and the larva basically devour the plant in a few weeks.
Dutchman reporting in. We're inflicting heavy casualties on the slugs, but they're taking a lot of ours with them.
On a serious note, yes, these things have infested everything at the moment. The entire country is plagued by slugs. If I leave the door open just a little they'll crawl inside in no time.
I haven't felt the need to start a full scale extermination yet, but the cider trap sounds great.
I ended up purchasing beer/cider traps from the rain-forest sounding company, at 8 for £10. It was this style.
They are very easy to make and definitely worth investing in.
Wow! I am neither in the UK nor under attack by slugs (though they do appear at times where I live). This sounds heinous! Would you mind describing in more detail the slug conditions where you live?
This evening, I shall do more than describe the onslaught, I will send pictures and video from the front lines! As @Arthur has described, we're at WAR!
At the beginning of summer, before the main invasion began, my wife wiped out what seemed to be seven generations of Mini Jabba-the-Hutt's, by chemical warfare. She even doused the wall crack they were calling home in salt. This almost seems like karma.
This morning's slug trap check has yielded poor results. Out of 8 traps, 3 contained not a single mollusc. However, 3 of the traps contained approximately 5 a piece. The remaining 2 traps seem to be the most powerful, entering double digits.
As I said, I will post a full update this evening to show you the extent of the invasion. Watch this space.
Probably only an option for more rural gardens, but you can enlist your domestic fowl to fight in your slug war.
The classic troopers are runner ducks, they love slugs and slug eggs, there's no stopping them.
But with a little effort, you can train chickens to hunt for slugs. Young hens are very adventurous in what they'll try to eat, they just usually don't try slugs because they are to big while the birds are still small-ish. But if you cut up a slug and hand-feed the pieces, they'll try it, and universally love the taste. Takes them a couple of feedings to get it, but once they've made the connection between slugs on the ground and the delicious pieces they've been eating, it's a massacre. And they'll keep the taste for slugs for the rest of their lives...
It is true that hens will eat slugs. But in my experience they will also destroy the entire rest of your garden, including all the plants you didn't want the slugs to get, so it's bit of a flamethrower kind of "solution" to the slug issue.
My tiny flock loves them, the problem is that they are indeed very adventurous, so they end up not being good for my desired garden plants either. So I still have to trap and manually send slugs to their delicious doom
It does provide great satisfaction to see them eat my beloved plants, only to be turned into eggs.
As a slug it's been rough out there. Everyone's always trying to take me away from food, yeet me, feed me to their chickens..
Why.... Why are you looking at me like that? Is that.... Not what you ... Meant?
Runs away, but as a slug
I don't live in the UK and luckily have had minimal pests on my balcony garden, but this thread reminded me how thoroughly overwhelming the slugs were when I spent a couple summers in Yorkshire a few years back. I'd seen the occasional slug in my parents' garden back in the US, but the sheer quantity and size I saw in the UK... I'm surprised y'all manage to grow anything.
Our new garden doesn't suffer anywhere near as badly as my old house, or the allotment I used to have. Something must be eating them here, there's a lot of wildlife and wetlands so I suppose the ecosystem is a bit more balanced than in the city. Or it's something else completely! Which is not to say they aren't a problem of course...
The absolute best way to deal with slugs is to go out just after dark with a head torch and a pair of scissors. Just cut them up. You can get hundreds on the first couple of nights. I usually found that by night 3 the numbers were dropping. After 4 or 5 nights the population is back under control for a few months.
Besides that I also tend to grow a lot of things in pots and plant them out once they are a bit more established. That's something I got into the habit of with the allotment as it made it easier to look after seedlings at home then plant them out. It does take a bit more effort than direct sowing but it's so much more reliable. I also notice that my polytunnel suffers less from pests that the beds outside although part of that is probably due to how much stronger everything grows in there. Slugs prefer weaker plants.
I don't know if this is related or not, but I live in the UK and i've had problems with Slugs entering the house (old drafty house problems), leaving trails on the carpet and even eating my cat's food.
With the huge up-tick in slug population this year, they are out to get food from whatever source they can find. I've had to bring the dogs' food storage box indoors as they managed to penetrate the lid through the smallest of crack and chow down on it.
If there is a doggy doo-doo that hasn't been collected in the garden as dusk rolls in, slugs will be munching down some mongrel manure. It's quite disgusting and fascinating at the same time.
You're going to need to take care of those draft entry points if you want to keep out the slugs. Or you can line the entry points with salt, but you will be topping up every couple of days.
Fellow Brit amid slugseason here, hello!
I'm sadly not too equipped with advice with this problem which does seem like a nightmare for those in your position... I'm mainly commenting as somebody who looks after the silly little things! I'm sure you're much more well-versed than me in means of protecting vegetables from those hungry tiny lumps—I was just wondering if you know any alternatives in this field? Considering the agony in which salt specifically causes them to go out, the intense burning and the dehydrating it brings all at once, it can be a tricky one...
Slug vent
Last night I stepped on a curious miniature sausage that had wandered into my kitchen and it was just *awful*... it survived it and was clearly in a really bad way; I've never seen a slug writhe like that before, insides all coming out and clearly just in so much suffering. Once I'd stopped sobbing and apologising to it I covered it up, boiled the kettle, and poured it over as I hear that that's a relatively instantaneous way for them to go. I could see that it stopped writhing quite quickly then so I tearfully moved it away...So yes, boiling water aside, like you've mentioned above, I wonder what the best way about this is that leaves happy carrots and happy slugs. Or at least, not writhing-in-agony slugs!
Sailors used to go out by drinking themselves to death. I'm of the understanding that beer traps essentially do the same thing. They drink, get drunk, fall in and drown.
That sounds fairly painless to me.
I'd genuinely read "bear traps" in your original post and was slightly horrified, if a little tickled by the elaborate and mediæval approach of tiny little metal spring-traps in your garden. I hadn't heard of a beer trap—that sounds like a good way to go, if any :)
Okay, that's had me in stitches. Now I want to 3D print a "bear trap" sized device for slugs, although I dare say it would horrendous in practice.
You could 3D print an ashtray size opened bear trap that's actually a beer/yeast water dish. Deploy to garden.
We have copper tape lining beds that got hit. Have also been more diligent about trimming plants to prevent overhang outside their beds. But we went to town placing beer traps. We use any small container we can scrounge (many many empty cat food tins or yogurt cups). It took time but has seemed to help. This year has been awful (NJ - USA). Doing veg gardening has made me hate bugs so much…
Eastern UK here and haven't really had a problem. But we haven't grown much which is slug-friendly (purely by chance) and we deploy nematode sappers in early spring every year as a matter of course.
Lost one cucumber plant last month but everything else (mostly potatoes and strawberries, some herbs) is doing fine. For a given value of "fine" considering it's been so cold and dark for most of the summer so far.
In the past we’ve placed shallow bowls of beer anywhere the slugs might pass through. The downside is you have to regularly scoop a surprisingly large number of dead slugs from the bowls. It can be pretty gross.
I've heard of beer traps but I don't want to buy any for them. Beers are for me.
The internet has a lot of recipes for yeast + sugar + flour + water and I'm going to try that first.
A recipe like that definitely sounds more cost effective when doing it at scale. We used long-expired beer and we were only guarding a small area of the yard.
Drink it, and assume your rightful place as Lord of the Slugs.
Beer for the Slug God.
It won't stop the current wave in it's tracks, but for the long term, you don't need to get more fancy than this: Take a walk in the garden every night and kill every slug you see. Over time it will reduce the flood to a trickle.
Any tips for ways of slug-murder that disgusted spouses or other family members could stand to do… besides alerting people with higher yuck tolerance?
No, sorry. The "humane" thing to do -- chopping their head off -- is pretty grisly.
Freeze them to death then add to your bird feed tray?
Henry Vacuum in suck, then Henry Vacuum in blow - aiming over the neighbour's fence?
They were incredibly bad in my area of the Pacific Northwest this spring, they and the earwigs wreaked havoc on my garden. Our growing environment is similar to yours except that we're experiencing a drought right now.
My understanding is that they like the yeast smell from beer, but I can't remember where I read that.
I spent some time looking up studies on the standard remedies all over the internet. Aside from hygiene and trying to attract predators, the solution seems to be throwing your hands in the air and walking away.
Supposedly copper will discourage them, but they'll cross it if they're hungry. Some people say wool pellets work until they get wet, others say they do nothing. Nematodes work on smaller varieties, but I'm not sure that we fully understand the long term effects of using them.
The poison stuff works, but it's not great for the water supply or any birds that eat slugs. Salt works, but then you're literally saying the earth.
The only things I did which made a noticeable difference:
I also have a bird bath and several feeders around the yard. I have no idea if the birds are eating any slugs, but they're at least fun to watch.
I am seeing a lot less damage now, but I have no idea how much of this improvement is from predators or drought.
I said I would post the slugfest.
Related, yesterday NYT had an article about the slug Olympics: https://www.nytimes.com/card/2024/07/25/science/snail-racing?unlocked_article_code=1.-E0.Ouzm.W1S72Mt_jAib&smid=url-share
(Gift article)
How bored do you have to be, or drunk, to enjoy this event?
You can always eat them. Seriously.
I guess I've been fortunate in that I've got raised beds and they prefer hostas.