In Organic gardening , just as in any garden, it’s extremely shattering to find your newly planted brassicas have been nibbled in the night by slugs and its easy to reach for the slug pellets, but you could do more to reduce the slug population in your garden yourself. After all, slug pellets aren’t the best things for you to eat, and just when the slugs are most active (in wet weather) the pellets are least effective. Slug pellets can also kill some of the most beneficial insects and beetles. Birds and animals eating the dead slugs littered on the surface may also be harmed if you don’t remove them quickly.
The Garden Slug which is a burrower and surface feeder will eat roots and cut plants at the bottom of the stem while the Keel slug lives underground and attacks roots and potatoes. The huge long slugs that you see do very little damage to your vegetables as they live on rotting vegetation and fungi etc.
If you don’t like to use slug pellets but prefer to carry out some kind of Organic garden pest control then there’s a range of things you can do to reduce the slug populations in your garden.
Thorough cultivation of the soil in spring exposes the slugs and their eggs to various predators, but if you follow a no dig discipline of cultivation, then keep the weeds down, as they are also a food source for slugs.
Beer and milk traps are valuable but you should sink the trap into the soil leaving the rim about 1.5cm above ground level to prevent good beetles etc from crawling in. You should implant the traps approximately one metre apart in a grid format.
Slug hunting at night is highly successful in severely reducing the population in your garden. On a warm damp evening you leave the house with a torch and a stick with a long darning needle fastened in one end. Stab the slugs where you see them and shove them into a box of salt. Sounds disgusting, I know, but well worth the effort. You may get the most slugs this way.
You can enhance the number of beneficial insects that hunt on slugs by placing small wooden boards or roof slates inbetween rows as shelter for predator beetles and insects. Slugs will also be attracted, and these you can simply destroy along with their eggs.
If all this seems a bit too ‘hands on’ then I suggest you consider a commercial kind of Organic garden pest control in the form of microscopic worms known as Nematoda.
A natural predator of the slug, these nematodes (or to give them their proper plural, nematoda) are naturally present in their millions in all well balanced garden soil. Nematoda infest the slug by laying their eggs inside its body, so killing the slug during the Nematodes’ reproductive cycle. The Nematoda, when applied to the garden, strengthen the natural population of Nematoda in your soil, providing improved natural Organic garden pest control.
You apply the Nematode worms by watering can or by Superspray type garden feeder attached to a hosepipe for larger areas. Once you cease applications the numbers of Nematoda will reduce to its original level.
You should enjoy up to six weeks long lasting control from one application, and Nematoda are safe to children pets and wildlife. They’re safe to use on food plants and aren’t adversely affected by rain.
Organic Pest Control in the Organic gardening vegetable patch is all about suppressing the slug level to an absolute minimum and so maximising your return on your vegetable yield.
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