This is inspired by Cecil’s column about killing slugs with salt.
Mike McGrath of You Bet Your Garden tells of his favorite anti-slug method. Simply lay a board on the ground near the place you suspect the slugs are skulking. The next morning, go out with a bucket of soapy water. Lift up the board, and you’ll find a squadron of snoozing slugs on the bottom side. Scrape them off into the soapy water, where the slugs will die.
McGrath also mentioned scattering hair around the flower bed. Supposedly, slugs can’t handle creeping over hair. Your barber will give you all the hair you want. As a bonus, you’ll have a bag of hair, and you can compare its intelligence to the kid down the street.
My highly successful anti-slug regime is two-pronged:
First, get rid of as many of the active slugs as possible with the beer method. I find that three or four styrofoam ice cream bowls around the garden work best, fill them 3/4 of the way with beer and let sit overnight. The next morning, you’ll have the most disgusting slug beer soup, but it does the trick.
To keep the slugs away after that, sprinkle some Ortho EcoSense pellets around the garden.
I can’t believe this is actually a question someone wrote in about instead of testing it. Especially in an environment that has not only plentiful slugs, but giant disgusting ones. How hard would it be to just go out onto the sidewalk, find a slug, and pour salt on it to see what happens? That’s what I did when I was 8, I don’t see the difficulty.
AskNott would this be Mike McGrath, former editor of Organic Gardening? If so, he is a wise man with a sweet corn obsession. Coming from slug country I concur with the slug/board, only I follow up with a pair of scissors while I am weeding.
This doesn’t kill the slugs. They do look dead, and simply float in it. But if you pour them out of the beer, they’ll eventually sober up and wander off. I stopped putting beer out when I realized I was simply throwing slug keggers.
Just wanted to issue a brief warning that Slug bait (metaldehyde) is quite poisonous to pets, and seems to be tasty to dogs, so if you use slug bait (please don’t) be warned that you or a neighbor may wind up spending a bundle at your local Emergency Animal Hospital…
Eat them? They are probably more tasty than the slugs (although my mother once ate a live slug (with a slice of lemon) when visiting Naples in her youth).
Don’t you have opossums up in Washington? They just love to eat the disgusting things, and have totally rid our garden of both snails and slugs. Granted we don;t have the giants you have up there, but I’ll bet a 'possum would find it a heavenly diet delight.
…But there are not enough to cause the eradication of the slugs there. I have had some enterprising friends who have talked and planned on marketing the residual foam from the salted slugs as a “Hair Groom” au naturale. Go Green!