This doesn’t mean stop killing the slugs – there are just much nicer ways of doing it than using harsh chemicals that can poison the ground and wildlife.
These slug traps – Slug Trap uses either beer or yeast to attrack the slugs. Slugs love beer. They don’t like cider or lager (Believe me, we’ve tested this out!) but they adore beer. We’ve not used yeast yet though but we might be testing this out shortly!
If you’ve ever needed an excuse to keep a stash of cheap beer in the shed, this is it.
We’ve found that very cheap beer (25p a can) works just fine and is quite palatable to humans.
The beer works by getting the slugs too drunk to get out again – so they drown. However this sounds horrid, it’s more humane than killing them with nasty chemicals. And it’s kinder to any frogs who live in your garden and to any birds who might eat slugs.
We’ve got a couple of green plastic beer slug traps on our allotment and they work quite well, but they do need checking every so often as the beer disappears. I assume there’s a breed of superslug who can get in drink loads and then staggers home … but it is effective at killing quite a lot! We’ve got one near our runner beans and one near our courgette plants.
With all this wet weather we’ve been having the slug po;ulation is bound to increase and we will need to make more effort to save the plants from them.
If you remove large rocks and pieces of wood where they might hide under during the day then this can help reduce the number. Have a pond as this encourages toads and frogs who will eat the slugs. A pond brings other wildlife into the garden too.
There are also nemotodes which kill slugs – this is very clever science! Just Slug Killer is packed with 12 million nematodes (microscopic worms) which race round your garden eating the slugs and snails! They’re too tiny to see but wil provide protection for siz whole weeks taking only 3 days from application to get started. This is Harmless to all other wildlife, pets and humans which is fantastic news too.
Damp weather does mean the slug will breed more – so if you find shiny clumps of translucent eggs you should probably dispose of them – as this cuts down the numbers too. If you’re not sure they’re snail or slug eggs you could treat the kids to a bit of wildlife science and put them in a jamjar with some soil and moss and see what hatches.
A bright mix of colours in this range of Pansy Universal F1 selection.
Plant them out 23-30cm apart – this ensures they have plenty of space to grow. You can arrange them in any pattern you like – usually plants are put out in odd numbers – but with these you will have enough to fill your entire borders so you can put them in rows or a pattern like the five spots on a dice if you have a deep enough border. Don’t forget these will look sunning in containers too – and if you’ve got a few too many then stick them in a small container and take it round to a neighbour as a gift. Most people would recommend keeping a few in reserve too so that you have spares incase something happens to your garden display.