Slugs. Yuk.

It’s funny how your own garden tends to become a model of what you think is ‘normal’ in the gardening world. I once took a turn round a beautiful garden near Bath (Ridley’s Cheer, a lovely B&B, if you want to pay them a visit), and was completely in awe of the owner who spouted Latin at me for half an hour, totally confident in what plant was what, as well as how to pronounce it. Generously, and reassuringly, she pointed out that it’s easy to identify plants in your own garden – you bought them, or lovingly raised them from seed, or inherited them from kind friends and neighbours. It is far more challenging to look round someone else’s patch and confidently name all their plants (an excuse I have been using extensively ever since).

There are no words.

Anyway, Latin names are not my topic for this post. Before we moved to London I had never understood why people make such a fuss about slugs. All that time and money spent on controlling them, all the endless conversations about little-known tips and secrets. To be frank, I thought these people were all mildly obsessive and best given a large berth.

But now I see the error of my ways, and I have started to actively seek these people out in case they can help me with my problem. For nearly everything we have planted in this new garden has been eaten to the ground within hours of us returning inside and wiping our boots. I started to get a little paranoid and wonder if the neighbours were doing it to spite us. There are few things more depressing for a gardener than coming outside in the morning to ‘do the rounds’, to find one solitary bean seedling remaining out of forty planted out the night before. I can think of virtually nothing that these slimy monsters haven’t devoured.

So I had no choice but to take some serious action. I have spent a fortune on greengardener.co.uk (highly recommended), and I thought you’d like a run-down of our experiences. They are not entirely happy.

Slug Buggers

Excellent name. The wrath that gardeners feel towards these gastropods (I hate that name; like they are gastronomically devouring my hostas, which of course they are) evokes some unusually violent urges, to which this product certainly appeals. And it’s a very nice idea too. Wool pellets, wildlife-friendly and biodegradable (adding a mulch to your soil as a bonus), are applied round the base of plants, or in a ring round, say, a bed of lettuces. Slugs don’t like moving over them, so the plants within the magic circle stay safe. We had a modicum of success with these, but not enough to make us confident in using them for something special, and they don’t work brilliantly after rain (which is something of a problem in current conditions). I think our slugs are super-strength.

Slug X Slug Trap

A beer trap, but better. The little wells for the beer are part of a complex (if you’re a slug) network of passages, and apparently the aroma of the beer confuses the slugs (my co-gardener empathises, he tells me) and they wander round the trap for up to 10 days in a drunken stupor. We caught a lot of slugs and snails. We had to empty the trap sometimes more than once a day. The results are truly revolting, but it feels very good to kill so many slugs. (Make sure you do kill them though – chucking them over a hedge will be a very short-term solution).

Copper tape

An oldie but a goodie. Slugs coming into contact with the copper are given a little electric shock, and dutifully reverse away from your precious plants. In my experience this works faultlessly when stuck around pots, so long as there is no other access onto the plant. We had our hostas up on a low wall, against a fence, and it seems the little blighters climbed up the fence and then onto the plant, thereby bypassing the tape altogether. Needless to say the hostas have been moved to safer territory. The other thing to bear in mind is that the tape is obviously totally ineffective against slugs already in the soil (they live underground too, just to make things more difficult).

You can also use copper grease, which I think is used for something mechanical and you can buy it from Halfords etc, but I would only use it on pots you don’t ever move, because it is very mucky stuff and you don’t want to absent-mindedly pick a pot up and find yourself covered in grease.

Nematodes

Another very satisfying way of waging war, and totally harmless to wildlife (very important to me, or I’d just have bombed the place with slug pellets weeks ago). Microscopic parasites that come in powder form, which you mix in a watering can and add to the soil. The slugs and snails then somehow absorb the nematodes through their skin and are killed from the inside out. Lovely. Nematodes are best applied early in the season and then at regular intervals, and unfortunately they do need reasonably warm temperatures to work best, which may explain their slightly disappointing performance this year. I would recommend this method for any garden, so long as you keep on top of the application schedule.

Night raids

Not very technical, but free and astonishingly effective. Go out armed with a torch, especially on a wet night, and prepare to be disgusted by the sheer numbers sliming their way across your garden. Pick them off by hand and dispose of however you see fit.

Tidy up

One of the most effective things we did was trimming the overgrown ivy off the fences (well, my co-gardener did it, but I definitely supervised). After we found dozens of snails hiding amongst it there was no argument that it had to go. It also gives us a lot more space for planting, which is always good. Likewise, areas of long grass are best kept well away from planting beds – you don’t want to give the destructive creatures a nice hiding place conveniently located next to your seedlings.

Coffee and grapefruit

I can’t help feeling that this is merely like giving your slugs a continental breakfast, but coffee grounds sprinkled on the ground does apparently deter slugs. The Garden magazine this month says the best thing to do is make a solution of coffee and water and spray it on the garden, but it also says this is illegal. I can’t understand why, so if you know please enlighten me.

I have also been told that empty grapefruits, cut in half and placed like a little dome on the ground, make a good trap. We caught a couple of slugs, but really when you have as many as we do that could well be just coincidence. We also attracted a lot of ants, and our upstairs neighbours thought we had taken to chucking our breakfast out onto the garden (a kind of compost-heap without the heap perhaps?), so we haven’t continued with this particular method.

I am desperate for any other ideas or traditional remedies. We can’t take any more depressing mornings witnessing the carnage of last night’s rampaging midnight feast around the garden. Please do let me know if you have any thoughts.