HELP! Slugs and snails everywhere! Any homemade solutions?

Question

I have an 140 foot garden and am sick to death of slugs and snails assassinating my plants! Is there a homemade spray that can be used on plants to deter slugs and snails that won't kill the plants? Also, are there any other homemade things i could use to kill them?

Answer 1

Slugs are attracted to the odors given off by the yeast fermentation process. The most popular bait has been beer. However, not all beers are created equal. In 1987, a study at Colorado State University Entomology Professor Whitney found that Kingsbury Malt®, Michelob®, and Budweiser® attracted slugs far better than other brands. Can’t sacrifice the beer? Try a mixture of 1 tablespoon (T) yeast, 1 T flour, 1 T sugar, and 1 cup water. The beer will need to be replaced at least once a week or more as it looses its potency or becomes diluted by rain.
The range of slug traps is only a few feet so you need to supply a few throughout your garden. Never sink the containers with their rims flush with the soil level or you run the risk of drowning ground beetles, or other important slug predators. The rims should be 1" above the soil's surface.

A circle of crushed eggshells, diatomaceous earth or wood ashes around your valuable specimens will work. A barrier of copper strips will also prevent them from crossing because it has a natural electrical charge, which repels them. Large clear plastic pop bottles with the bottoms cut out and the tops removed then placed over your very young seedlings will act like a little greenhouse and also keep the snails and slugs out. Need a haircut. Your hair can be laid out as a barrier. If you do not have enough hair then try a circle of coffee grounds, thorny twigs, rosemary, pine needles, mullein leaves, oak leaves, sandpaper, roofing shingles, hardware cloth, wormwood or tansy.
Note wood ashes are very basic. Use only on acid soil.

Comfrey: Slugs will come in droves to eat this. So place it in the troubled area for several nights then remove the slugs and put them into a bucket of salty water. Repeat!

Grapefruit or Orange Rinds: In the troubled area in the evening you can overturn half of a grapefruit or orange after you have eaten the insides. The next day scrape out the slugs and snails dispose them in the usual manner.

Wet Carpet: Place pieces of wet carpet on the ground in the troubled areas. Each morning scrape off the snails and slugs. Dispose of them in the usual manner.

Spray plant with undiluted drip coffee. This will kill small slugs in 24 - 48 hours. Robert Hollingsworth and colleagues at the Agricultural Research Service in Hawaii were field-testing caffeine as a toxin against a non-native frog. But they discovered that 95 per cent of large slugs were killed by a spray containing two per cent caffeine.
At a concentration of just 0.01 per cent, caffeine reduced slugs' feeding by one quarter. A cup of instant coffee contains about 0.05 per cent caffeine.
Peter Usherwood of the University of Nottingham & upholds Hollingsworth's findings. Usherwood too showed that if an entire plant were sprayed top to bottom with liquid caffeine in 1-2% solution, then the smaller slugs & snails that ate the plant would die within two days of having eaten the plant. But Usherwood found that plants also had a negative response to exposure to the caffeine.
Perhaps the best thing would be to grind fresh beans and circle that around the plants. More caffeine than spent grounds and does not have to be on the leaves.
Coffee is acidic so do not use on acid hating plants.

Slugs have many predators in the natural world. Garter snakes, birds, rats, rabbits, moles, hedgehogs, skunks, toads, and frogs are just a few. A number of insects, including some types of flies and beetles prey on slugs. There is even a predacious slug--that's a slug that eats other slugs--but it is relatively rare. Ducks and geese are domesticated animals that can actually provide slug control if you are set up to handle them. Not for everyone, certainly not those with small city gardens, but they can be effective in the right environment.

While beer traps certainly can catch slugs, you may need quite a lot of them to really make a difference. In the end, faced with the choice of sacrificing either your lettuce or your beer, you may opt for losing the lettuce.

Trap crops: Certain plants seem to be favored by slugs and can be used to divert slugs from your prized plants. Particularly good trap crops include: green lettuce, cabbage, calendula, marigolds, comfrey, zinnias and beans.

Answer 2

Get a couple chickens! If you live in the city, chances are you can have up to 3 hens but no roosters. They love slugs and snails. Just make sure they have a safe place to sleep at night that racoons can't get into. A dog house with a straw bed and a horizontal rod for a roost work great. Chicks are only a couple bucks at the feed store and keep them in a brooder with a hot light until they're 6 weeks old and you're ready!

Answer 3

Beer. I am not kidding! Take a few shallow pans (jar lids work great) and place them in the garden. Set them into the dirt a little so that the edge is level with the dirt.

Fill with beer (cheap, flat, doesn't matter). The slugs are attracted to the yeast smell, and drown. You'll find several shriveled up corpses floating in the morning. The alcohol apparently dehydrates them.

Also, scatter clean broken eggshells. The rough edges cut the little buggers up. I'd also heard that gravel (rough stones, not smooth pea gravel) will stop them, as they won't crawl across surfaces that will shred them.

BUT, we had the nasty things crawl up the brick wall and make slime trails over everything. One was even dangling from a slime 'rope' from a window ledge. Gross!

Beer worked!

Answer 4

Theres a few things you can do, i suppose it just depends how kind or enviromentally friendly you are. You could use slug pellets but this is not very kind to the birds who may feed on the slugs. You could go down the salt route and sneak out late at night in the dark with a torch. You could place little pots of beer in the ground which effectively drowns the slugs and to be really enviromentally friendly you could opt for copper strips around containers or raised borders to deter them as they hate it. A last alternative is to buy Nematodes, mocroscopic organisms you apply to the ground that attack the slug and eventually kill them. Hope that gives you a few options :)

Answer 5

Salt is great for killing them. Another thing to try is putting out trays full of beer as it attracts and then drowns them. :)
Good luck

Answer 6

Put some beer in the plate, and place it all over the garden. They will go in there and die.

Answer 7

salt..it will dry the suckers right up