Slugs are, quite simply, a pest.
Whether they’re tearing through your plants at night or getting into your house in the early hours and leaving behind slime trails, their antics can result in anything from mild annoyance to red-faced anger.
Fortunately there are solutions to the problem and in this article I’ll be sharing with you a range of methods for getting rid of slugs and keeping them off your property for good.
Tidy Up
First things first, you need to make your garden or home as inhospitable to slugs as you can.
Slugs need cool, damp and dark places – which is why they come out at night – so removing dead leaves and other debris from their environment is very important.
If you the conditions as undesirable as possible for them, they’ll move on to somewhere more pleasant – and you’ll also get the added benefit of a tidy garden
Barriers
Construct barriers around your plants to prevent slugs from getting to them.
One of the best and least expensive materials for a barrier are crushed eggshells. Slugs will avoid moving over eggshells because they are sharp and cut up the underside of their bodies. Diatomaceous earth also provides the same effect.
You can also use soot or sand, which slugs don’t like to crawl over because it dries them out.
Plastic buried in the earth around your plants provides an effective fence to keep slugs out – it should be at least 7 inches tall (from the ground) to be effective. Smaller plants can be protected with the top of a fizzy drinks bottle (cut in half and pressed firmly into the ground over the plant).
Finally, copper tape also works as a great repellent because the slug receives a mild electric shock when it tries to cross it and is forced to move in a different direction. This is a particulalry effective method if you have a lot of plants in pots because copper tape is adhesive and can be stuck around the rim.
Traps
In my experience, beer traps are the best method of getting rid of slugs because they can catch and kill tens of them in a single night.You can either buy or build a slug trap that entices a slug with beer and, whilst it is feeding, the pest falls in and drowns – this is commonly known as the beer trap.
To construct a beer trap, use a small tub (a margerine tub or large yoghurt pot work well) and bury it in the ground up to it’s rim nearby to where the slugs are feeding. Fill the pot with beer and leave overnight. In the morning you’ll have a pot of dead slugs, which you can dispose of in the trash can or on the compost heap.
If you would prefer to buy a beer trap, then the Slug X Trap is highly recommended because it has received accolades from all over the world including a fantastic testimonial from popular UK gardener Alan Titchmarsh.
Chemicals
If you decide to use chemicals such as slug pellets, be sure to read the label before you buy because some brands can be harmful to the environment, family pets, other wildlife and even young children.
Before using chemicals to get rid of slugs, I would highly recommend trying out the slug trap (see above) first because it solves almost 90% of slug control problems.
If you’re one of the minority that hasn’t found success with the slug trap, then the best slug-killing chemical I’ve found is a slug pellet called Sluggo. This is an organic pellet that slowly kills any slug that ingests it over the course of a few days by altering it’s metabolism causing it to die of starvation. As well as being very effective, it has the added advantage of being non-toxic and safe around animals and people.
Get a Duck
The final method of getting rid of slugs is perhaps not all that practical for most people – get a duck or a chicken.
There’s nothing a duck or chicken likes more than to get it’s beak around a juicy slug and it will eat them by the bucket-load. . If you have duck wandering around outside, you definitely won’t have a slug problem!
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Pests And Diseases
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