<p>Ok, so I am a novice organic gardener. I am proud of the little things sprouting up so far – but slugs have discovered my baby melon plants and my poor defenseless cilantro seedlings.</p>
<p>Anyone have suggestions? I am giving them beer (in clean cat food cans), relocation assistance (flinging over the fence), and sprinkling them with incense (well, wood ash). What’s next, diatomaceous earth (yes, I read my Rodale’s)? I am trying to avoid spending any more money, but I need a robust solution that doesn’t involve chemistry.</p>
<p>Am I being too touchy-feely? Do I need to deal a death dose of something blue?</p>
<p>Beer is our weapon of choice. Can the slugs get into those cans? I think H uses clamshells which provide a nice ramp down to where they can exercise their right to drink unresponsibly. I’ll ask him tonight if he has any other lines of attack.</p>
<p>Do you have a neighbor with chickens or better yet a duck… Either will make short work of slugs and snails… </p>
<p>Beer is another good suggestion although I have an alternative way to apply it. About 10 o’clock at night, gather up a 5 gallon bucket, two or three beers, and a flashlight. Head out to the garden and pick the snails off your plants and drop them into the bucket. Drink the beer as you work. </p>
<p>:cool:</p>
<p>P.S. For added entertainment, take the bucket of slugs and snails over to the neighbors house and let the ducks and chickens loose on the bucket - huge feeding frenzy…</p>
<ol>
<li>Plant something the slugs do not care about (tomatoes, onions, cukes, etc.)</li>
<li>Raised garden beds and coarse beauty bark in between them - the slimers do not like to get their bellies scratched up. Keep the bark dry; use drip irrigation which waters only the beds, not the space in between them.</li>
<li>Chicken wire fence around the fence to keep the bunnies out, then sprinkle iron sulfate - containing granules around the fenceline, not around the beds.</li>
<li>Move slug-attracting herbs to pots on my stone patio. Emeraldkitty went even further - she planted her lettuces in hanging baskets :)</li>
</ol>
<p>Copper tape helps to keep slugs out of raised beds, but it is so expensive!</p>
<p>“In 1987, Colorado State University Entomology Professor Whitney Cranshaw had his students conduct a test for the beverage that slugs liked the best. Here is the results of that experiment: note Budweiser was chosen as the test standard and the number of slugs choosing Budweiser represented one Bud Unit 1.00.”</p>
<p>My father uses the beer, but I don’t know how well it works, since I found a strawberry with a slug in it a small distance away from a tin of beer. I don’t know how many there would have been otherwise though.</p>
<p>Oh, you guys are awesome! Funnily enough, BunsenBurner, I have been giving them Bud!</p>
<p>But I don’t understand what’s supposed to happen – the beer is poisonous, or they just get drunk and drown? How often do you change the beer in the cans?</p>
<p>Uh oh, eireann, guess I better put beer around my strawberries. Thanks for the tip. (though there’s no fruit as of yet)</p>
<p>I wish I had chickens or ducks or my neighbors did – I just have cats and a dog. I think they are pretty useless when it comes to slugs!</p>
<p>(you’re right, scualum, I should be drinking the beer. Although I’m not a Bud fan)</p>
<p>I second the copper strip. Snails usually won’t cross a copper strip because it causes an electrical reaction with their slime. We’ve purchased the strips at ag supply stores in the past. I don’t know if a Home Depot type store has them or not. They’re about paper thin sheets that can be formed around curves about as easily as paper. I’ve put them around the base of some small trees. If your plantings are in something with a border, this might work.</p>
<p>I have found that if you do a dusk walk through of the garden, you’ll see all the slugs out there, talking about what they’re planning to attack next. I then cut them in half with a pair of scissors and leave the bodies lying around. Appallingly enough, the next batch of slugs then is attracted to the dead bodies, which makes it really easy to cut the new ones in half. It only takes a few days of this before your slug population is well under control, even in the wet and rainy Pacific Northwest. </p>
<p>I also prefer the garden walk at dusk. Rubber gloves and a bucket of salt water. A few such evenings and the population goes WAY down. I’m kind of liking the idea of using the dead ones to attract others, too. I’m willing to sacrifice a pair of scissors to that cause.</p>
<p>If you don’t want to use scissors, a metal skewer does the job too, but then you have to push them off the skewer, which goes past my limits. I just use my gardening scissors.</p>