Here in London we have extra pernicious slugs and snails. I've never quite seen anything like it - they are everywhere. It's something about a calcareous soil, and damp shady gardens. To make matters worse, someone at some time thought it was a good idea to import French escargot snails, and they got loose. And now they're everywhere - something else to blame on France.
I avoid traditional slug pellets, because Other Cat is a little bit stupid and she has a tendency to eat things that maybe she shouldn't - and slug pellets can be really harmful to cats and dogs and birds.
I'm not a big fan of slug traps, because you have to clean the things out, and dessicated slug corpses and dying snails aren't the most fun thing to deal with.
So I tend to favor a product called NemaSlug.
NemaSlug is a wonderful product. It's a biological control for slugs which are the bane of my garden.
From the Green Gardener website:
Nemaslug® contains naturally occurring nematodes for safe and effective slug control. Each pack of Nemaslug® has millions of microscopic nematodes that kill slugs both above & below ground.
These nematodes are teeny tiny worms that are carriers of a bacterial infection that kills slugs dead. And they burrow under the soil to die, so you don't have to see their little slug corpses. Unfortunately, this product's effectiveness is temperature dependent, that is it doesn't work very well when it's cold.
It's been an unprecedently warm autumn with just enough dampness to make the slugs and snails happy little critters. But because it's been warm, we still have a small window of time to apply NemaSlug and allow it to work (it takes a few days for it to be effective).
I didn't get many of my planned activities done today (e.g. tidying and bulb planting) but I did manage to apply the NemaSlug. Bye-bye slugs.
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By the way, last I heard this product is not available in the US.
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