Slugs - This may be of help

How to be a ‘Slug Whisperer’.

Personally I find going out when it's dark with a torch and picking them up works best. My biggest problem is snails which hide in the stone wall at the back of my garden. I tried yeast sugar and flour in warm water which worked last year but this year they mostly had a drink and carried on. I tried beefing up the mix with some red wine we didn't like and that helped a bit.

 

Snails here too as the extra heat and occasional drought mean the slimesters need a shell in which they can hide and go dormant till there's more moisture. I find they are far more voracious than the slugs we had in our wetter Belgian garden.

I tend to gather them up as I go and then lob them over the road into the hedgerow or maybe our pond depending on where I find them as it can be a long trek to the road. If they're not too big and I'm in the veg plot I drop them in front of our two hens for a snack.

 

Pop in to your local fishing tackle shop for a catapault (!) Its far too hot to go walking with snails..........

 

It's also far too hot for snails to be out and about except in the nursery where I have my treasures gathered, waiting to be planted out and getting regular waterings to keep them fit. I tend to find them by the dozen or more so a catapult would take time too.

 

So when I cannot water, when its raining I go out with my torch and bucket, the blighters get a second chance as I re-release them on the railway line behind my house, where either they can live happily or provide good food for the blackbirds, robins and jays.

 

Re that article:
You have to laugh -'give them nowhere to hide'. You'd have no chance of having any plants at all then! Heaven forbid you should have any pots either.

Go out at night with a torch. I'm afraid I'm sound asleep by the time it's dark here, which is about 11 pm at this time of year.

There's plenty of them around during the day here anyway, so it's a load of rubbish to say they aren't out in the daytime. They just lurk....

 

Personally I have the differing opinion that giving them a place to hide is how you get them. A strategically placed piece of wood/pot will normally be a retreat they love and all you have to then do is turn it over and dispose. I think the "give them no where to hide" is only applicable if you have raised beds, for say a veg garden. The best beds don't have wooden sides where they can secrete themselves.

There is an interesting guy called Joshua Sparkes, who runs a permaculture/syntropic farm which I think is coined agroecology, and he suggests that people should become beetle farmers to deal with slugs. The idea is that in conventional farming/growing, there isn't enough habitat for beetles and you need this because they don't travel a great distance. If you incorporate areas for them to live and breed then the slug population will be checked and you get less problems. In a garden situation I don't think it's much more difficult that having the odd wood pile but I can't say it seems to work for me even though our garden built for wildlife, as the slugs/snails, are still a massive problem.

 

Interesting guy indeed !
For a lonely evening or in the unlikely event of a really wet day, have a look at this:

Can also be found here :
Birch Farm Woolsery | Natural farming in North Devon

 

@Thevictorian I can remember Geoff Hamilton saying it was a good idea to put barriers round your veg beds to keep beetles in so they would stay and control slugs and to give them shade.

I use upturned pots to attract slugs and snails. Large rhubarb leaves work too. Makes them easy to find and despatch.

 

I seem to have a really big leopard slug taken up residence in the top of my water butt, there are a lot around here, rarely see other slugs.
Now snails are everywhere after the slightest bit of moisture.