I got fed up with stepping on slugs and snails when going out for a smoke in the evening, so I was quite chuffed with the number of bodies that there were after one liberal helping of their favourite sprinkles.
There was a fair bit of slime around some of the corpses. but I left them there thinking a bird or other animal might find them After a few days the flies did, masses of them.
So I cleared them up. Last year I had a butter tub and collected them in there, then stuck them in the bin on Bin Day. But that was a bubbling mass of stick within a day or two.
So what's the best way to get rid of them? I just put the current crop into the composter. I guess dead slugs are no more use for anything than when they are alive?
|
There do seem to be more than usual this year, although fewer of those huge red foreign jobs than a few months ago. Snails of all sizes too.
There's a dark, dead-straight concrete-flagstone path between two box hedges with well-watered lawns on either side between our house and the cousins' gaff 70 or so yards away. One often walks down it in the dark to or from drinkies or eaties, and there's no light on it to enable one to avoid the busy gastropod traffic in the dark. Every second or third pace gets a crunch or a squelch. One hopes small predators, mice, voles, hedgehogs, carrion birds etc then come out to enjoy the feast, but the path is covered in mucky stains this year.
|
|
Risky to dogs who ingest the slug/slime....lung worm.
|
|
Leave them out as a warning to the rest?
|
A few years ago we were infested with slugs...more so snails. I used one of those wide mouthed softener ' bottles ' to put the bodies in. You need a clothes peg on your schnozzle when you take off the top to add more.
We christened it ' the Jar of Oblivion ' . Sice ' pebbling ' a lot of my beds and growing only gastropod proof plants, we rarely see one in our garden.
Ted
|
There are ( were) a lot of the big orange slugs in my garden.
Quite a few of them appear on my lawn and borders well before sun down which I have not observed in previous years.
Those I see get speared with my slug spike ( a straightened wire coat hanger will do).
After similar result to others who have collected them my victims find their way over a neighbours fence to feed his Leylandii :-)
|
My dog almost died from lungworm. Before you could stop him he would crunch up snails. Yummy.
Not sure how true it is but I'm told that killing slugs with pellets, which in turn are eaten by birdlife, kills the birdlife. Especially so in Spring when feeding their young. Probably more than a hint of truth in it.
|
Scattering poison about, which the older generation than me did with merry abandon, strikes me as short-sighted and malevolent. For one thing I like moss and grass growing on paths, and anyway a physical removal policy is pretty easy for people who don't.
It's so obvious that poisoning insects, 'weeds', moss, clover, gastropods and so on is going to have dire knock-on effects that it really isn't worth discussing. People just shouldn't do it. Poison is a last resort for some real menace, and I can't think of one of those offhand, except perhaps the odd human.
|
We've got one of those little bins the council give you for food waste. Any slug caught lurking around my back door gets picked up on the cats' poo shovel, quick sprinkle of sodium chloride and whanged into the bin.
Since the food waste is turned into compost to help plants grow I think it's a fitting end for the slug.
|
>>Not sure how true it is but I'm told that killing slugs with pellets, which in turn are eaten by birdlife, kills the birdlife.
Appears not to be so with hedgehogs:
www.wildlife-web.org.uk/hedgehog/facts/dangers.html
|
I'm sceptical about these claims for all the natural predators that allegedly love slugs.
We get hundreds of frogs from our ponds, so many you have to be careful not to tread on them. But I have never yet seen a frog eating a slug. When I have tried giving a frog a slug it turns its nose up.
We once kept ducks. They ate everything else in the garden, but not the slugs.
|
>> I'm sceptical about these claims for all the natural predators that allegedly love slugs.
>
Don't be
A slug lays around 500 eggs a year . If something wasn't eating them they'd be covering the planet to a depth of many miles by now!
Predators are mainly birds hedgehogs frogs and invertebrates such as millipedes
|
Beer traps are the best, as they don't have a risk for other wildlife.
|
>>Appears not to be so with hedgehogs:
My problem seems to be that the Hedgehogs don't appear! - on my allotment I have a lovely warm 2ft x 3ft box stuffed with dry grass and leaves that has remained empty for the last 3 years, I would love some 'hogs scuttling around down there, but apart from squashed on the roads no-one has seen one for years around here!
|
|
Got a big beauty here at home. See him/her once a week. The dogs know he's here.
|
>> Beer traps are the best, as they don't have a risk for other wildlife.
>>
>>
'cept for the hangover :-)
|
>>
>> A slug lays around 500 eggs a year . If something wasn't eating them they'd
>> be covering the planet to a depth of many miles by now!
>>
So the slugs we see are really just a sort of tip of the iceberg.
I accept then something must be eating the eggs. But it's the slugs that eat our vegetables, and nothing appears to want to eat slugs. I'm grateful not to have millions of eggs hatching out, but as just one surviving slug breaking through the defences can wreak devastation in a night, the problem remains unsolved.
|
The "problem" can never be solved. the number of slugs is in balance with the number of predators and their food supply. Kill more slugs and more will survive to fill the gap. All you can do is to ensure that predators such as hedgehogs and birds are encouraged and protect the plants you care about. Make sure you pick up dead vegetable matter such as leaves and put them in a compost bin so you don't make a "slug friendly" environment.
Picking the the things off manually on an early morning foray into the garden and dropping them in a bucket of water is rewarding!
|
|
If you worm with Milbemax (sp?) Rob, then that covers Lung worm too.
|
Dead Slugs - Armel Coussine
