Another Garden/Home Pest: Slugs
Portland is slug city, I swear. Not only am I surprised by the sheer number of the slimy, gooey spotted creatures, I am constantly shocked by the size.
Here’s one I found last week. The little pea seedling in the picture is about a week old and maybe three inches high.
Slugs are not necessarily bad, but they can be damaging to your garden plants. If you have a natural setting in your yard, or if you don’t care if the slugs consume your tender green leafy vegetables, then just ignore the slugs.
Personally, I am not suffering from a huge amount of slug damage, but I do notice some ragged leaves, even on such wildflowers as Foxglove. Usually, I notice the damage as “spots” or holes in the leaves. And I also see the trail of the slugs: Translucent, web-like trails across the fence, the soil, the leaves, and even through the grass. The damn things were eating away a small group of Foxglove that I had to finally move to another spot in the garden in order to combat the slugs.
I do not believe in using poisons to get rid of pests, so I just wanted to throw that out there, for the three people reading this.
I had pretty good results from coffee grounds. I read that slugs do not jive to caffeine, so if you lay out a three-inch wide layer of coffee grounds around plants you want to protect, the coffee strip is a deterrent for those hungry slugs. This helped really well in my strawberry patch, because I put a caffeine strip around the entire patch.
You can also make slug traps. Take a small tub-like container (I used a yogurt cup, and it was a bit small for the size of my slugs), and cut some rectangular holes horizontally along the top, maybe an inch from the top. Bury the body of the container up to an inch from the holes in the dirt. Pour some beer in the container, because who doesn’t like beer? No, seriously, slugs really like beer and the smell attracts them to the death in the beery depths of your homemade slug trap.
slugs, garden, pests, Portland, foxglove, vegetables, coffee grounds, slug trap, beer
August 12th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
[...] it such a kickass cleaner, kind of like bleach — also technically an herbicide). You can try my coffee ground trick. Or go with diatomaceous earth (which is just crushed up seashells) which will kill the ants by [...]