Since I lost my hens, I have noticed a lot more slug activity in my garden. I know I have hedgehogs and a variety of other predators that eat them, but either the slugs are breeding voraciously or the cycle is out of balance.
My new asparagus bed that I planted last year has seen some young tender spears munched and chewed, which is particularly annoying as I made a conscious decision not to cut any at all this year to allow the crowns to build up. So the slugs have eaten them instead.
It’s been pretty cold over the weekend, with temperatures dropping as low as 4C, which is cold enough for a ground frost. This will slow any slug breeding, but I needed to act fast. It takes me a while to decide whether to actually actively kill the slugs, mostly as I prefer to let nature achieve a balance.
Slugs do play a vital role in composting and other garden processes and of course they are a vital menu choice for many beneficial garden creatures. Plus they don’t know boundaries, so no matter how many I destroy in the garden, there are literally millions in the surrounding area just waiting to move in.
But I digress.
The truth is that I have put in place an integrated control system to protect my vegetable beds. First I employed my beer traps. A few years ago I trialled a range of slug control measures for the Telegraph. Top of my list was Slug –X, now made by Garland, which captured 147 slugs in my garden on one night while on test. Traps are an excellent control but are not for the faint hearted. They need to be emptied regularly and dead slugs smell and look disgusting. I remember clearly trying to ‘bribe’ a friend’s son to count what I’d trapped, I thought it was the perfect pursuit for a teenage lad with an interest in gore, but he refused and I had to do it myself. Yuck! Be warned, it’s not pleasant. But traps do offer an effective means to an end; laced with beer they provide a soporific last supper to these slippery beasts.
There are a huge variety of different types of slug traps now available, some are complete with baits, others designed just for beer, or milk. Look out for purpose-made traps, with lids to stop rain and beneficial insects from falling in. You can make your own but you do risk catching ground beetles and other friendly bugs that frequent the garden.
Next I used the other main weapon in my armoury, Nemaslug, it’s a biological control that targets slugs above and below ground. It contains a healthy population of naturally occurring nematodes that infect the slugs with a fatal bacterium so that they crawl beneath the soil and die, it’s gruesome at best, but it does work and it is completely safe to pets and wildlife and the perfect choice for organic gardeners. It’s really easy to apply. You just dilute it into a watering can and water it onto moist soil. The main ‘rule’ is that the temperature needs to be above 5C but the nematodes can withstand the odd frost, which is just as well in this cooler weather. What’s more they work well in wet weather when they can move more freely through the soil.
