SLUGS! HELP?

As I was working in my perennial garden today, I found at least a dozen slugs, or, at least, what I think is slugs. They look like a bulbous beige and brown fat snail. How do I get rid of them? How muh damage can they do?

Gloriaglo

Slugs can be a real menace in the garden. They eat the foliage and flowers from just about anything.

There are many ways to fight them, but best non-chemical one for me is hand-picking with a flashlight at night and dropping them into a jar of salt. Some will tell you to put beer out for them to drink and drown in... never worked for me, maybe the type of beer makes a difference??

You can put down a board near where they live and they will crawl under it and hide from the sun, then you pick up the board and do the drop in salt routine to kill them - another version of hand-picking.

There is slug bait out there that is chemical but I didn't want it to get into my garden so much. Tried it once and the dead decaying bodies were too gross for me to cope. YUCK!

Of course, the best possible way is to get a duck. or hire children to salt them directly! (but take them away from your plants first or the salt will kill what you're trying to save from the slugs!)

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I never had any luck with the beer either. I spray them with vineger and water 50/50.

also if you spray the vinigar and water mix on theplants it drys and when the slugs crawl on the plants the rehydrate the vinigar and drop off it has to be reapplyed if it rains or after heavy dew

Gloria,
there are hundreds of methods to get rid of slugs, but on the long run.... none work.

The best method is just to collect and destroy them, and around early Autumn, get out at night with a torch and search around the surface, and just under for their eggs. The eggs look like little glass balls, so just get them on a shovel and throw them in a solution of salt and water. This way you wont have so many next year.

Beer, Milk or any other types of traps just don't catch enough, and the slug pellets which one can buy to spread around the garden only get a few, and at the same time make the birds sterile which eat these slugs, or even the pellets. So by reducing your slug population by about 5%, you could be destroying about 90% of the bird population for next season.

As I believe, the best way is, as was said, just to collect and destroy.

Since they are cannibalistic, I often just cut the first third of the body off, and leave them in the open, this way other slugs are drawn to them by the smell, and you can get a lot of their pals, who are coming along to feed on them, and cut them up as well, and so on, and so on. This way, you can catch many more than you'd ever imagined in your garden.

These little buggers are everywhere.

All the best

Wintermoor

is it true that frogs eat slugs? we have lots of froggies that live in our trees and about the yard and woodlands behind our house. i saw a couple of slugs early on in the year but haven't seen any since then. could this be why?

Could be Debi,
I know toads love the black slugs here in Europe, but what also may be keeping your slimer population down are hedgehogs. Do you have hedgehogs?

All the best

Wintermoor

Wintermoor
no we don't have them here exceps as pets. they are only fornd wils in your part of the world. but it would be cool to get one if that is one of the things that they eat in the wild

gloriago...i used to crush up clean, dry eggshells and crumble them up, sprinkle them around my plants. they say that it was good for the soil, too? i'm told the snails attempt to cross over them, and the sharp edges rip their guts, killing them. all i know is i didn't really have much of a problem in my one little experimental flower bed (my first flower bed ever at my last house), but i saw snails everywhere else in my yard. could have been coincidence, but not sure. i don't have a problem where i live now...yet. i've only seen three, and just killed them. if it's true that they're good for the soil, maybe trying it couldn't hurt?