The best way to avoid slugs from eating your choicest vegetables is to grow them in containers, off the ground and to ring fence the containers with slug pellets or salt.
At its simplest you could have a plank of wood resting on two bricks. The containers rest on the plank with a liberal sprinkling of pellets on the plank too. The two bricks provide the only way for the slugs to get on to the plank. If the containers were on the ground then slugs could descend upon the containers from any direction.
Another way would be to suspend your plank with rope from a wooden frame. I defy a slug to waste the night climbing up a frame and down a piece of rope. Come the morning a bird will have snapped up an easy meal before the slug gets anywhere near your plants.
Suspend and ring fence is the most effective method for fending off slugs. Anything planted in the ground will just have to be protected by a random sprinkling of pellets and damp nights spent on guard duty.
Some thinking out loud about slug bashing
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4 comments:
I have had some fairly serious snail problems in the past. Liberally dosing their typical hangouts with pellets for a week drastically reduced the number I needed to fend off, then pellets around the pots and copper around access points did the rest.
My other problems were a family of rabbits and a chipmunk. Bloodmeal sprinkled around the perimeter of the garden seemed to work there... I learned not to drop it too near the plants, because if I accidentally dropped more than a little dusting, it would attract the stray cats, who didn't eat my harvest, but did love to dig it up.
Such is life trying to grow things in the middle of a small city.
It's a never ending battle. I suppose everything has to eat. Just not in our back gardens!
Did your copper turn green, and if so, did it make it more effective or less effective?
Containers definately make a difference. We have a small garden so most of our vegetables are grown in containers.
I would say that slugs and snails in the containers is about a 1/4 of that in the few beds that we have.
The copper mesh I bought did turn colour, but it still seems to work. I also got a roll of copper tape to wrap around pots, which hasn't tarnished at all.
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