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I Got Slugs

ColdSmoke

Extreme Member
I think....and Sluggo doesn't seem to be working. Maybe I need to apply it more frequently? Any other products or tricks to destroy these demons?
 
you cant have ANYTHING on the ground i 100% agree.

i prune all my toms to be like 18" bare stem to the top of the containers. same with my old bih plants and pretty much all non annums.

research "molluscicide" imho. ive never ever had slugs here in houston so icant offer you any real advice here.
 
haha. i was just outide training and rehanging and i realized i am a hypocrite!

i let my watermelon pollenators run along the ground!. the triploids are trained onto vertical lines though.

in my defence... watermelons are crazy, they do their own thing. i need maximum flowers from the pollenators so i have to let them sprawl out in and around the triploids such that there is plenty of male flowers to steal.
 
I had a big problem with slugs as well, earlier in the season. After I cleared all of the leaves from touching the soil things became manageable. I became obsessed with slugs for a while, here's what I did (my wife thought I lost my damn mind):
 
- Nightly patrols (around 10-11pm) with a really bright flashlight, inspecting all 60 of my plants. If I saw a slug, it was instant death. These patrols were really helpful and saw a dramatic decrease in damaged leaves.
 
- Sluggo applications around the base of the plants. (I really laid it on pretty thick in full circles around the potted plants.) I would come out during the nightly patrol and watch the bastards munching away on the Sluggo pellets instead, which always made me smile.
 
- Removing their hiding places. I still go outside in the middle of the day and search for them hiding underneath things. Rocks in your garden, or anything that provides escape from the sun is where they are hiding. I had no idea how many nice safe and comfy slug places I had in my backyard until I started turning things upside down. With fewer places to hide, there are less slugs at night.
 
Hope this helps!
 
A pair of ducks can roam about an acre and devour almost all the slugs. Pekin, Ancona, Welsh Harlequin, Rouen, Indian Runner, and Muscovey are all good choices with the Ancona being the most energetic and hungry IMO. The largeer breeds like Pekin, Rouen & Muscovy make great dual purpose birds but tend to be lazier than Runners and Anconas. The large breeds will get the banana slugs the smaller ones cant handle.  
 
 
Other benefits are the eggs they lay, they're way better than chix eggs, especially the Welsh Harlequin, plus they make fertalizer all day long. After you butcher them the feathers can be added to the compost pile. 
 
Some drawbacks are the noise, except the muscovy is almost silent, they shit everywhere, they eat all the beneficial bugs and frogs. They can put a whoopin on lizzards and snakes too but probly wont eat them unles theyre starving. 
 
Salt.
 
Guaranteed.
 
Go to Walmart and buy a 40lb bag of Pool Salt for $6.
 
Make a ring around your garden or make a satanic pentagram just to show off to your neighbors.
 
Either way, it won't harm anything else, and requires zero maintenance. Slugs will NOT touch it.
 
Hell Fire Grill said:
A pair of ducks can roam about an acre and devour almost all the slugs. Pekin, Ancona, Welsh Harlequin, Rouen, Indian Runner, and Muscovey are all good choices with the Ancona being the most energetic and hungry IMO. The largeer breeds like Pekin, Rouen & Muscovy make great dual purpose birds but tend to be lazier than Runners and Anconas. The large breeds will get the banana slugs the smaller ones cant handle.  
 
 
Other benefits are the eggs they lay, they're way better than chix eggs, especially the Welsh Harlequin, plus they make fertalizer all day long. After you butcher them the feathers can be added to the compost pile. 
 
Some drawbacks are the noise, except the muscovy is almost silent, they shit everywhere, they eat all the beneficial bugs and frogs. They can put a whoopin on lizzards and snakes too but probly wont eat them unles theyre starving. 
 
LOL...you're weird. 
 
pool salt is calcium chloride.

chloride is toxic around 20-50mg/l.

i would not pour that stuff on the ground. once it rains you will have a ring of death around your plants for quite a long time.
 
Not true.
 
I drain my pool every year right onto the lawn. 6500 gallons with 140 lbs of salt.
 
I WISH it would kill weeds but it just makes everything greener.
 
Wait a minute. Are you saying if I sprinkle it dry it will kill shit? I have about 5 miles of fence line that grows the meanest friggen weeds known to man. In late summer you need a friggen carbide chop-saw blade on your weed-eater, hence: it doesn't get done. Google Goatshead, Beggars Lice, Buttonweed and Mullen. 
 
If that will work, I will draw a white line of Salt all around this friggen place!
 
sprinkling it is one thing, but from what i imagined mentally based on your description of the satanic plant encirclement... that would kill the grass.

havent you ever used calcium chloride to melt salt? the runoff kills the grass around the sides.

they used that shit to melt literally 1mm of ice last year infront of our office last year and the grass was dead for months.
Scoville DeVille said:
Wait a minute. Are you saying if I sprinkle it dry it will kill shit? I have about 5 miles of fence line that grows the meanest friggen weeds known to man. In late summer you need a friggen carbide chop-saw blade on your weed-eater, hence: it doesn't get done. Google Goatshead, Beggars Lice, Buttonweed and Mullen. 
 
If that will work, I will draw a white line of Salt all around this friggen place!
try some sedge hammer imho.
 
Weird, I use a product every year called Ice-Melter™. I don't know what that shit is but it doesn't kill anything. I'm thinking your texas lawns are pussified. :rofl:
 
Scoville DeVille said:
Weird, I use a product every year called Ice-Melter™. I don't know what that shit is but it doesn't kill anything. I'm thinking your texas lawns are pussified. :rofl:
 
that could be the case actually. we run st. augustine grass pretty much everywhere.
 
they put alot down too. there was almost 0 ice, and they put down so much it would crunch under you feet. probably 5lbs on this little 100sq.ft. entrance area.
 
Sorry about that. :)
 
When I lived on Whidbey Island (Slug grand central) I used a product called Slug Fence or something like it. It was basically a 4" tall vinyl ribbon embedded with salt. You would bury it about an inch deep and slugs wouldn't go near it. You could either put it around your plants, or your pots or raised beds or the whole garden (what I did). I aam not seeing it anywhere on google so maybe they don't make it anymore.
 
Here are some other things out there you can try. One of my friends swore by the heavy gauge wire around his raised beds but I have never tried it. Also, I've hear that slugs won't go near copper. If you want to spend a small fortune, get a 4"tall piece of copper ribbon to surround your garden. LOL
 
I found this battery operated slug fence when i was looking for that Slug Fence stuff.
 
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I was going to suggest just getting some copper strip, and making rings out of it. It doesn't have to be very wide, and it works a charm. But, then I decided not to waste my time, because most people don't believe in such science-y superstitions, anyway. If it isn't made by a chemical company, it doesn't work, seems to be the prevailing logic.

But if you can get past that, copper works so very good. It has to be elemental copper, not just something copper plated. I made a few rings out of soft copper tubing. Use a coupling to close it around the plant. No slugs.

You can also just bend a strip into a ring and close it with a clothespin.
 
you might think copper is better for the environment, but you would be wrong in a number of instances.
 
copper pollution is a huge issue. mostly due to "organic" farms spraying copper sulfate, but also due to copper leaching from mines and shit like that, though the EPA has closed alot of the bad copper mines.
 
a strip of copper sitting on the surface of some soil probably wont leach anything appreciable into the soil, especially since copper is strongly sequestered by organic soils etc.
but if you have sandy soils without clay or without much organic material, spraying copper, or spreading copper salt hydrates onto the soil can cause runoff issues.
 
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