Slug pellets

[watervole]

It's a personal decision as to whether you use slug pellets or not. 

I don't, but that's my choice and I won't expect you all to follow it.

However, if you do use them, don't make the mistake that the new guy on the allotment just did.

Do NOT use too many.

Use them at the recommended rate - as they are LESS effective if you use too many.  (if the smell/taste is too strong, the slugs don't eat them)

See here for more information on slug pellets and the best time to apply them.  Remember the risk to pets and wildlife.

If your young runner beans are getting eaten, try this trick. Take a plastic drink bottle and cut off the top and bottom to leave yourself with a clear plastic collar about six inches high.  Place this around the seedling and push at least an inch down into the soil. Sometimes, this is enough to deter the little blighters all on its own, but if it isn't, drop ONE slug pellet inside.

Comments

[nwhyte]

We use beer.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Beer is good. Anything fermented is good. I'm told it's the yeast that they actually like.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

For the benefit of comment readers, put the beer in a jam jar and sink the jam jar into the ground until it's only an inch above the surface. the slugs come in and drown.

Replace contents every couple of days.

Don't sink the jar too deep or creatures that you actually want in your garden will fall in and drown also.

[artw.livejournal.com]

(nwhyte's "we" ;-))
I just use little plastic tubs - yoghurt pots etc- and don't even sink them into the ground much, just enough to keep them stable. I have to throw them out before U comes home from school... For a while I haven't bothered (not growing veggies) but I am trying to get some more herbs established so I put a couple of pots out last night when it was wet. I caught about fifty, maybe more. And no cute beetles. But I have no false hopes: slugs are like willowherb and dandelions and the Terminator.

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

Radio 4 tells me coffee grounds are really good as slug repellent.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Haven't tried that, but then we don't make that kind of coffee...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't that make the soil quite acid over time?

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

The best way we found of dealing with slugs was to use toads. First of all we got a slug trap, a low box with wells in it to put beer. We put it beside the garden shed adjacent to the compost bins, we got lots of slugs there so there should be a high capture rate.

The slug trap needed to be cleared out every few days and topped up with more beer. However, we soon found that a pair of toads had taken up residence! Each time we checked the slug trap there was one or two of them in there with fewer slugs in the beer wells. The level of slugs in the garden itself was also reduced, so it wasn't that the slugs weren't declining.

The toads grew as a very fast rate and eventually were too big to get into the slug trap through the side openings, so we took the lid off and placed it loosely on at a rotated angle.

We found that there were two notable advantages to this method of slug control.
1. We didn't have to dispose of the bodies.
2. The slugs got dealt with all over the garden, not just were we put down beer.

Toads are your friends!

[watervole.livejournal.com]

How can I get toads into my garden...

My pond only attracts frogs at present. Sniffle.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I don't know. The toads we had just turned up. Though we did move one (very carefully) from the front garden to the back.

We've got frogs in the garden of our current house and they seem to like slugs as well.

I understand that a difference between frogs and toads is that frogs live in ponds, whereas toads only breed in them.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Frogs live out of ponds a lot of the time - I've found them in my rockery before now.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Have you considered making your gardening posts filtered? Opt in or opt out, either would work, but I'm afraid I have absolutely no interest in these posts, but I know you have a good number of people who are.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I don't want to filter them as their are people not on my friends list who read them (judging by some of the comments), but I'll try and remember to put a cut tag on the longer ones.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Well, your choice, but even behind cut tags, if your output continutes to be roughly

3 gardening : 1 potentially interesting to me

then it's just using up slots on my friends list and it makes me likely to either drop you altogether or effectively mute you with filters at my end, neither of which are ideal.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

To clarify... "slots" are the things I have 50 of on my friends page before I hit the "previous posts" link. I read a lot of lj on my mobiles on the train or out and about elsewhere. The signal is often bad and takes me a long time to load a page. If the page is full of content behind cuts it's wasting spaces where there could be content I wanted to see.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I understand the problem. It's how I used to feel about Twitter feeds before I found a way of blanking them out. (I still see the header, but not the actual posting)(though in your terminology, it would still use up 'slots' if I had that problem)

I'm not quite sure what to do if a cut tag is of no use.

I have a general policy of not friending people I've never met (with a few exceptions for exceptional cases who are usually relatives of friends). Thus, filters aren't really a useful option for stuff that non-friends want to read.

I'll understand if you do decide not to read my journal - though the gardening posts will die off as the season progresses. This is the very active time of year.

I've always enjoyed reading your LARP stuff - if you'd posted it to a filter, I might never have read it and become interested.

[dumain.com (from livejournal.com)]

Suggestion: tag all your gardening posts with gardening.
Hawkida then filters you from her friends page and subscribes to
an RSS feed of your journal via something like feedrinse
http://www.feedrinse.com/ (no idea if they are any good just first site I found when googling for this sort of service).

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Max, see the reply to my reply. All gardening posts tend to be tagged 'allotment', what dumain is suggesting might be helpful.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

No, that's not really a solution for me. I have blogs I've subscribed to via RSS and I just never fire up the RSS reader. Plus that feed wouldn't include comments and if something's getting lots of comments I want to see why and I want the ability to post comments as well, *without* having to go through multiple links.

Of course, another alternative might be for you to have an actual gardening blog but it seems a bit extreme a suggestion.

[rockwell-666.livejournal.com]

But how do you load slug pellets into a shotgun...? ;-)