Slugs Wars…
In a time not that long ago.
In a garden not that far away
The slugs ate all my plants.
Seriously tho. Anyone else’s worst enemy slugs and what are some tactics you use?
My most effective have been:
Picking them off at night with the kiddo.
Crop dusting with wood ash.
And this year I discovered pac choy is the ultimate trap plant.
There are several discussions about this, just type in slug in the search option , the little magnifying glass next to your avatar in the top.
I witnessed a slug in this super wet year climbing on a baby lettuce , smelling it ( i swear to God)and slide off without eating it, it was a mix of varieties that i got from fellow members, must be a hundred varieties. I save seed and just seed again when they come, and hope for a dryer period where they disappear or this weird disease that pops up out of nowhere when they’re at their peak.
Chaos gardening works as well, cause slugs need to change their stomach every time to eat something different.
The following is a translation from a dutch permaculturist Marc Siepman, much info on them. Instead of bad, bad, bad snails. Snip them in two, throw them to your evil neighbore, drown them in beer, poison them to death (and kill their predators while you’re at it), it explains that we cannot win, no one ever has and why that’s perfectly fine and why you should embrace the slug.
Author: Marc Siepman, marcsiepman.com
Taxonomically, the snail belongs to the Gastropoda, which means “gastropods. The average gardener will find this an apt description; it is little more than a stomach on a slimy foot. Because snails reveal faults in the system, they are not too popular with gardeners. Yet they are ecologically important. An ode to the snail!
Left-wound houses are very rare. Jeremy (above) has become quite famous. Photo: Angus Davison, University of Nottingham.
Relationships
The essence of permaculture is to restore and maintain relationships, in as much diversity as possible. Therefore, you cannot speak of harmful or beneficial organisms; they all have a function. For example, weakness parasites like the tarantula remove weakened trees from the system to make room for healthier ones, which is hugely important. Snails actually do the same thing: they make space by removing (parts of) weak plants.
Snails have many other relationships with other organisms. For example, slugs move the spores of mycorrhizal fungi, to name a few.
Food
Not every snail eats the same thing. Slugs, such as the common road slug, are known to cause considerable damage to living plants.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
The article is here, if you are ready to love the slug, translate it!
Yes, there are a few threads about this. I agree with Hugo about chaos gardening, or polyculture or whatever you want to call it. When I first started planting vegetables around our land -which had never had vegetables before- the slugs went crazy and I thought it would be a battle forever.
In hindsight, I realized that I threw things off balance in favor of the slugs by planting brassicas in neat rows and clearing out weeds etc. Now, on my 6th year of gardening, after mixing it up with many aromatic herbs and pollinator flowers and shrubs and dynamic accumulators and yes, weeds (btw, most weeds turn out to be edible or medicinal anyway), things have found a new balance.
Yes, I have slugs but not too many. The frogs arrived and the robins and plenty of vegetables make it to maturity without too many slug holes.
Now the deer? Well, that’s a balance on another magnitude that large scale human activity on lands is responsible for. Haven’t figured that one out yet 
To give you a very short answer, I have solved slug problem by placing old wooden boards along my garden beds. From early spring, I was checking daily during the day for the ones hiding there, and once per night on garden beds, with UV flashlight. Prolem was solved in a couple of weeks. The key is to start early in the season and to do it daily.
I not ready to fully embrace the slug. I don’t mind a few, there’s plenty of snakes, frogs, toads, birds etc… but nothing seems to put a dent in them. There are far too many of them. They wipe out seedlings over night. Had a whole bed of carrot seedlings devoured in a couple nights. The don’t seem to like any lettuce I’ve grown which is good.
I will have to give the boards a try. I do have Logs as retaining walls as I am growing on a bit of a hillside and I know they hide under those, perfect slug habitat. Kind of a terrace garden but I would lose to much soil without them.
I know how you feel. Sorry i was insensitive.
I’ve been snipping them in two for an awful year when i started gardening. “Me or you buddy” style thinking.
I made a small pond, frogs live in them. I have bits where snakes could live, regularly see toads there, amphibians a ton of biodiversity in plants and insects, but still i can’t grow a lot of tender plants in that bit of the garden. It’s become more for perennial and herbs.
I’ve not tried a lot there , because in the other garden it has gotten a lot better, without me doing lots against them and i hope it’s because of the wide genetic base that produces healthy plants, which they do not bother much, and in light of this article it makes sense.
https://marcsiepman.nl/artikel/ode-aan-de-slak/
Not saying it’s the holy grail, just a lot of common sense info to read up upon.
No worries,
I don’t really do any pest control other than the slugs and that’s just wood ash and picking them off. As for snails I only see a few and let them be.
The slug problem just seems to be that I have a very good habitat for them and they keep multiplying if nothing is done.