Slug Hunting

Slugs on Honesty

When we first started trying to grow vegetables in our clay field nothing ever  seemed to germinate.  A single evening springtime walk revealed seedlings germinating like mad, but like baby turtles on a beach, they were being snaffled equally quickly by an army of slimy predators before they could make it to the relative safety of the morning.  The ground, the hedges, the walls  were a heaving mass of slugs – big orange ones, small brown ones, stripy ones and black ones, revolting white ones which exude a milky gunk when prodded and even a magnificent leopard slug or two.

I have pretensions of growing organically, flea beetles aside, and given the vast amount of wildlife around which should, but apparently isn’t, eating my slug and snail population, this is a sound strategy.  Slug pellets are therefore out.

I contemplated using a biological control, but given that that all my googling of nematodes mentioned six weeks of moist weather and we were already cooking in thirty degree heat in April, that looked like a big fat no-no, too.  And way beyond what we could afford – this is frugal pest control, after all.

So hand picking it was going to have to be.  And has been for the last few years.

The veg garden is relatively small, comprising 11 slightly raised beds each 6m long by 1.5m wide, annoyingly just too wide for me to reach into the middle without the risk of a face plant.  The beds are arranged 7 across and four more at right angles below these.  Half metre wide paths run between the beds (just too narrow too safely wheel a barrow along - yes, it was all planned) and metre wide paths run around the perimeter.  

I can manage about an hour of bending double searching with a head torch, the Salty Slug Pot of Death in one hand and a rubber glove on the other for picking, before my back screams enough.  Naturally, warm wet nights are the best – or worst – and on those conditions I can expect to get three to four hundred in a night.  Every night.  From late March through into July.  The record is over six hundred.  That is a phenomenal number of slugs from a small space.  Where do they keep coming from, year after year?

Grass path cut yesterday and edged today

My paths are also part of the strategy.  They are grass,  Well, ok, some grass but also the blessed creeping buttercup, clovers, wild mint and peas, daisies and occasionally the odd teasel, highly inconvenient in the middle of  path but worth leaving for the goldfinches.  As a biennial plant, It’ll only be in the way for two years.  The paths, with the exception of the teasels, get cut about once a week or so and the clippings left behind.  The theory is that wilting vegetation is more attractive to the slimy gastropods so they feast on that rather than my lettuces and beans.  Not sure how successful this method is as I haven’t set up  a control uncut path next to sacrificial seedlings.  But certainly I find most slugs on the paths or amongst the clippings.

 

And of course I try to encourage other wildlife.  Hedgehogs are inhabitants of the garden; we have woodland on one side and thick hedges on a further two, so there is plenty of cover for them.  Toads abound – there is usually one sitting in the cat’s water bowl of an evening.  Presumably having a spruce up before heading out to dinner.

Glow worms are the real project.  Yes, I know they are tiny and probably have a small impact on the slug and snail population, but once you’ve watched a little fellow  the length of your thumbnail attacking and paralysing one of those big giant orange horrors then you have to respect them.  The first summer we saw no glow worms.  The second spring there was a single glowing female in the grass beside the drive, and another in the autumn.  Now I will find three or four larvae  - and they are the killers – almost every time I turn over the soil in a veg bed.  And there are many, many more in the compost bins.  All in all a success story.  Any day now we should see some glowing!

Glow worm in the sweet pea pot

One day, I might be able to leave slug hunting to the natural predators.  But I doubt it.