Friday, May 18, 2012

Slugs Slugs Slugs

Slugs. They never used to bother me before. They also never used to eat my plants down to nothing in  a matter of days either. I knew we would have a bug problem this year, but my goodness!! Do slugs even count as bugs? This morning, just on opening the back door, I counted no less than twenty of the slimey little beasts just on the plastic deck chairs. For the past couple of days, while we researched what to do about them, Andrew and I have spent each morning and evening (I get a.m. he gets p.m., which seems to me like I got the worst end of the deal there) combing the garden picking them off the plants. They are particularly fond of the pepper plants. From the reading Andrew did this is what we've come up with: A circle of sand around the plants, supposedly they won't crawl over the sand...cornmeal...supposedly they will eat it and their stomachs will explode....and beer...supposedly they will drown themselves in booze....we'll see what works. At least this year, we are not alone in our misery. Chicken neighbor has them bad too. He doesn't treat his yard either.

4 comments:

  1. Also try using diatomaceous earth - apparently, it cuts their undersides to shreds

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  2. I was going to suggest what Dani did. We have slugs too (they all qualify as pests! but not as bad as you. I agree that it will likely be a terrible year for bugs.

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    1. Actually we put a ring of Isabelle's playsand around each plant, and we filled an old juice bottle with beer and dug it into to ground so only the opening was sticking out. I think a combo of both seems to being doing the trick pretty well. We caught quite a few slugs in the beer and even though we have since taken that up, we still haven't had much more of a problem on the plants (the deck chairs are still popular though), so I guess the sand must be working too!

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