2024 will forever be remembered as the year of the slug! The warm, wet spring and early summer has meant these gastropods have been everywhere, making a nuisance of themselves. Read on for how I have dealt with them this year.
They started off by munching their way through hundreds of my seedlings. Their favourite in my greenhouse was the strawflowers. I sowed three trays of these, remembering how they had been decimated last year, and was happy with how well they were doing when I noticed that a few were missing. The next day, more had been mown down, so I checked under the trays and all around the greenhouse for the culprit. This continued for quite a few days until the whole tray was eaten - only then did I find the slug, curled up underneath. Needless to say, he was swiftly evicted! Luckily, the other trays did not get touched so they are now happily growing away in my beds.
Another victim of the slugs have been my dahlias. I overwintered them by covering the bed with an insulating layer of straw so I was expecting the dahlias to emerge once the frosts had passed. After a few weeks, with no signs of the dahlias, I pulled back the straw to see that the poor tubers had sent up lots of shoots which had then been chewed by slugs before they could emerge from the straw. I removed all the straw as I thought this must be giving cover for the slugs to hide from my resident toads. Sure enough, the dahlias are now doing really well.
Gardeners are on an endless quest to find a way to avoid slug and snail damage. I recently went to a talk by Monty Don, of Gardeners World, and he said this is the question he is most asked. As a regenerative flower farmer, it is a tricky thing to balance slug control with my aim to be sustainable. Here are the practices I have tried to keep the slugs from ruining all of my hard work: -
- Garlic spray - I Blitz up garlic in water in a spray bottle and spray over the leaves of plants. Garlic is supposed to deter slugs and many other pests from eating plants.
- Do a “slug patrol” in the greenhouse. Just after sunset, particularly when it has been raining, the slug army emerges from their hiding places. I pick them off and evict them from the greenhouse.
- Encourage predators. I have allowed habitats for frogs and toads in my flower patch - they love living under the tarpaulins I am using to suppress weeds. Recently, I have found a giant Leopard Slug in the flower patch - although he was a gruesome sight at first, I am actually really pleased to see him as apparently they predate on the smaller, plant-eating slugs.
- Accept them! Slugs are a fact of gardening life and are part of the ecosystem. I try to remember all the good things that the slugs are doing for my garden and flower patch, such as breaking down dead plant and providing food for birds and amphibians. I sow more seedlings than I need to ensure I have backups for the inevitable losses that will occur, particularly of the varieties that slugs enjoy such as strawflowers and delphiniums.