Slug Control for Organic Gardens

These slime-coated citizens of my garden are not especially picky eaters, which makes them beneficial in the environment– just not my garden. By breaking down dead raw material, including animal feces, nitrogen, and other necessary nutrients, get recycled and reused in different ways. I hate to admit it, even by fertilizing the soil.

Think it or not, slugs are a part of some animal diet plans. Birds, like geese, ducks, thrushes, chickens, and blackbirds, along with toads and frogs, are a few of the slug connoisseurs in our world.

Slugs recreate by finding a mate or through self-fertilization considering that they are hermaphrodites. I have yet to be effective with slug training or moving efforts, and hence my garden continues to be a slug battle zone

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Slugs like my radishes.

Slug Anatomy for Dummies.

If you look at the acrobat on my oriental lily (top picture), you can clearly see a large hole called the pneumostome, or breathing hole. This is positioned in the slug’s mantle, a vestigial physiological area that, if he/she were a snail, the shell would be secreted from here. This is likewise where the slug sucks its head into for protection.

Under the mantle is the slug’s rectum and genital openings. You can see a faint line running under and sort of parallel to the hole and this is the bottom margin of the mantle. The long, light-brown line running somewhat the length of my now-deceased circus slug is its skirt. Above the skirt is the foot and below the skirt is naturally the sole in silly slug anatomy.

The 2 long tentacles on the remarkable Sluggo’s head are light-sensitive opticals with the shorter arms underneath that area being sensory for tasting and sensation. I am so glad my taste are not on my fingertips. They also smell through their eyes (optical tentacles).

If you are a banana slug, those teeth can make for some beautiful risky sex. It is a bit X-rated, so I won’t go into details, but it sounds like it is all enjoyable and video games up until one slug chews off the other’s, ahem, appendage.

A petunia’s entrusts to slug slime.

Sluggomotion: Slip-Sliming Away.

How does a slug get around my garden? Up a 3-foot lily? It’s everything about the foot, ’bout the foot, ’bout the foot, and mucous. More than one kind of mucous at that.

Not all slug slime is developed equivalent. A slug can not live by thin slime alone– one should have thick slime for traction (like climbing up lily stalks).

Then there is that muscular foot. Through a series of complicated muscle movements, the incredible Sluggo and his/her acrobatic friends slide around, up and down, and all around, wagging their slug tracks behind them. Propulsion created through waves of muscular motions and some slimy-goo for those hard-to-reach spots

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Successful can o’beer trap!

Time for the Laugh Line: How to Manage Slugs

I use a number of various prongs of attack in my war against slugs. There are other safe techniques– these are my favorites and have worked the best for me and my garden.

Motivate natural predators to visit. Develop environments for frogs and toads and feeding stations to draw in a variety of birds.

Often monitor for damage. Slugs do many of their feeding at night. Throughout the day, they conceal in cool, wet spots such as under flower pots (being squishy has it advantages), rocks, wood, particles, and similar.

I have also found strolling around after a light rain is practical, given that this brings them out of hiding. One spring night, simply about sunset, I went strolling around my lawn and those brown buggers were all over! I filled a gallon bag.

Beer traps are a favorite but require thoughtful placement. I utilize two types: cat food cans sunk into the ground and glass containers on their sides. The cans need to not be flush with the ground– this avoids beneficials from mistakenly stumbling in. The horizontal container is somewhat angled to help the beer pool at the bottom and keeps many of the rain or sprinkler water from filling the trap up. I do not empty them every day unless the trap has actually filled with slugs.

There are also commercially made traps. These men are not beer snobs. I had a homebrew batch that didn’t turn out well and use it and the slugs are enjoying it to death!

Utilizing slug bait. I was using a supposedly safe slug bait and killer product which contains iron phosphate. The more I read about it, the more hesitant I am. Despite the fact that it was authorized by the Organic Products Review Institute (OMRI), I do not believe we understand enough. Remember, there was a time in the not-so-remote past that people thought glyphosate was safe.

By the way, the next time you get slimed, wipe it off before washing. That mucous is hydrophilic, suggesting it likes water and will become more rather of less. What are your tried and real safe slug slaying approaches?