Saturday, March 25, 2006

Saturday 25th March - Slug Warfare

The beer traps seem to be working really well now that the weather is warming up and the slugs are becoming more active. Dr Marie at work has advised me on some organic biological warfare which I will use if the beer fails. Apparently nematodes are the thing, easy to use and Marie swears by them.



If both of the above fail, plan C appeared in the garden pond today - frogs. They are back for the first time this year and we should see some spawn in the next few days. I will bury our old washing-up bowl on the allotment, fill it with water and frog spawn which I hope will grow into slug devouring frogs.

3 comments:

clairesgarden said...

the slugs here prefer McEwans Export, they dont like Tesco's own brand, if you are consistant with early on collecting you will reduce numbers considerably. I use traps and also 'bran trails' which is a handful of bran, under a damp folded newspaper(do this all the way down the side of your veggy bed, you can put stones on top of the paper to stop it blowing away), in the morning, the slugs will be munching on the bran- I pick them all up with a spoon(too squeemish to touch them) and put them all in a jar, then lid on the jar and jar in the bin. . or you could take them some considerable distance away and let them go, or(this is definatley not for the squeemish) poke them through with a needle onto a long thread, dry them and hang them up for the birds in winter, I know somebody who does this and the blackbirds love it.

Frankie said...

YUCK!!!! That's disgusting!

Anonymous said...

Ye gods! Ugh! That really is a brilliant idea, but the thought of doing that to them makes my body do involuntary twitches. If I had the guts, I'd try it, but I'm going to stick with Tesco Value beer. The pests love it down my way.