Slugs and Beer

The slimy little critters are everywhere. Am going out now specially to get beer!! What distance between "traps'? I have beds all over 2 acres. Someone on the forum uses soda bottles on their sides to eliminate dilution. I will try this method along with the hunt down and destroy with salt water pistol in hand idea, also from the forum. It is more precise than the salt shaker. Just call me quick draw!

Try cutting a couple in two with a Stanley/Linoleum knife, and put them in two different places. Since they are cannibalistic, the smell (they can smell food up to 30 feet away), will attract many others for the feast on their brethern, then you can cut them up as well and spread them around the garden on stones or plastic trays (broken or old of course). You can collect lots that way, and then give them the salty dog treatment.


Wintermoor

Edited to say: I almost forgot, use the beer to quench your thirst while doing all of that unpleasant bending ;-)

This message was edited Friday, Jun 20th 1:38 PM

You might try this. I just put 6 in my yard, and "beered" them up about an hour ago. Tomorrow morning will tell... Mine are not as pretty as Rootdoctor's because I just used cheap 12" stepping stones, but they should work equally well.

http://davesgarden.com/t/382015/rootdoctor

Update: After just one night, I checked the traps. Some of them have so many slugs you can barely see the bottom, A couple of them have maybe 10-15, so it tells me the traps do work, and where the largest slug population lives.

SLUGS..yuck! We have so many here, it's the State animal. They are so darn big and black. My poor little garden suffer every year...we could spend hours every morning eliminating these things (fill several gallon buckets) and never even touch on the population.

My neighbor has a very large garden. She controls them with salt..Rock salt. She sprinkles it along the outter edges of the garden plat and it works great. The salt is good for the garden too! Rain will only distribute it further, so you don't have to put it down so often.

Beer works great..but we have just to many for these traps. I'm sure many other Pacific Northwest gardeners know so great trick to control these fat guys. Would love to hear what others are doing that works!

I don't have a huge slug problem, but they are there. I went to wallyworld and bought some of those glad containers, the shallow ones. I planted them all around my hosta beds, and every other night or so we go out and clean them out and refill fresh.

I REALLY like the nights that fall on "every other", because that's the night that we go out with a 6 pack and the slugs get about 2. That leaves 2 for me and 2 for DH. :) It's a good thing.

JoanJ I like your slug control method best of all the ones posted! Personally I use Ortho Bug-Geta Slug bait. Kills the little Bas----s dead and I get all the beer.

Maybe that's the route I need to take! I placed out two traps last night and only caught ONE slug! Arrrrgh!!!!