Pacif NW Banana Slugs

Scooter bug has shown you the African Land Snail http://davesgarden.com/t/427828/
but did you know the Pacific NW has always had to put up with the GIANT plant eating banana Slug
pict is of a smaller then average size
http://www.strever.com/picts/banana-slug.jpg

Welcome to Dave's strever. Wow Hiouchi! I never knew anyone who actually lived there. Beautiful area. I well remember the first time i saw one of those monsters. YUCK! They don't even look like something that would be good with garlic lol.

hi Frogs ?? tree type or eating kind ?

you are the very first person who had even heard of Hiouchi
we live in Fountain Valley AND Hiouchi now.
but retiring to Hiouchi permanently by end of the year.
the Banana Slugs sure do slime the bottom of your shoes.
i've heard rumors that the indians do cook them, but haven't
checked that out for sure. maybe they do go with garlic :-)

Dick Strever

Hi Dick! I have tree type frogs who think that they are the proud owners of my garden. Course I have some hummers that think the same thing. lol

Those slugs are too ugly and nasty for even garlic to make them better. The idea makes me gag.

I used to go to Crescent City semi regularly. Had to look around and see what was in the territory.

Janice

These huge slugs, (according to a recent gardening article in the local paper), should be either left to do their thing or picked and taken back into the forest where they can do their benificial job. According to this article they actually get a bad rap and do not do much damage in the garden. The author obviously has never had to go out and find every seedling eaten in an entire bed overnight and only one of these uglies laying there with a slimey look about it!

Zany

if people saw these critters with their own eyes they wouldn't believe it
i do send them back into the forest :-) i use a stainless poker
we have at the minimum 4 different species
the leopard which is the the one in the pict
then we have the BANANA which can actually get 12 " long
then a smaller one with a florescent orange skirt is kinda pretty
& then the very tiny common garden slugs like the rest of the world have
my son planted a vegetable garden with seedlings from the nursery :-)
yep the next morning they were all gone & slime was all over the place
so i don't know what the article was about ?
but just what kind of benefit do they do in the yard ???

Dick

This local writer seems to think they should be fed dog food and allowed to spend their time oozing slime as they squeeze through her deck boards to feed. LOL not in my yard thanks!

I do admit that the tiniest slugs, the dark gray ones that bury into the soil, do more damage than these big ones. But that does not make them more likeable, just easier to see and dispose of. As for taking them back to the forests....I am silly enough to do that if they were endangered but they are far from the endangered species lists and Bob would die laughing if I told him we needed to make daily runs to the forest to relocate slugs.

Ducks and geese love slugs but give you fowl doo to deal with. You can keep them down by not leaving things near your gardens they can hide under during the day boards, tall grass, buckets. At one time I used some big crates to put my flats on as they were hardening off I quit that and went to tables on a concrete slab. That really helped. Some say copper wire will burn them and they will not crawl over it but never tried it myself just hasven't gotten around to it. I put lots of large deck containers to over winter in the gh and deslug the bottoms before they go in. Sometimes I salt them when they come from under my deck and I catch them out in the open it is pretty hard on them but then they was away easy with the hose. Ernie