I go out at night wish a flashlight, put a bunch of them in one place, step on them, and sweep their poor mangled bodies under a plant to act as additional fertilizer. After a while, it becomes harder and harder to find any. If you can find someone else, including children, to help you, it's even more effective. Low impact, cheap and, for me at least, it has been effective. Good luck!

Ingrid

Pull back the mulch leaving a circle of bare soil and sprinkle a ring of wood ash or lime (CaO, not limestone) around the perimeter. Renew after 1/2" of rain. Use the minimum amount, as it will raise the pH. I used to do that with delphiniums in the spring. Otherwise slugs would kill the plants that survived winter by eating off all the shoots as they appeared. Copper wire on the pots sounds like it would be worth a try.

I think I've read before that copper is indeed a snail & slug repellant, but I don't remember the details of how it works, or what its limitations may be.

If the salt did not harm your plants, and if the watering of your pots did not cause the salt to leave the bin I think this idea might be worth exploring (if you can find a way to do it). A wide, long lasting band of salt around your plants will certainly keep the mollusks away. The salt would fatally dehydrate them pretty quickly if they tried to cross the band, so as long as the band was wide enough they would never cross it and your seedlings would be safe.

Hopefully commenters from the Pacific Northwest will soon be here with their suggestions. They have the North American climate most akin to that of the Netherlands, and they also have to constantly deal with the most intense snail & slug problem.

We tried beer and the slugs seemed to enjoy it.
We tried the copper method and the slugs just yawned.
The remedy of choice around here is Sluggo, or iron chloride. It is sold as an organic treatment that just kills slugs and is not harmful to anything else. It is advertised as rainproof but has to be reapplied every couple of weeks. It does work.

I checked, it is sold in the UK as an organic treatment for slugs as well. Maybe it's sold where you are too. hth.

Here is a link that might be useful: capital gardens in uk, organic use advanced slug killer

Hehe, they probably call you Ingrid the Cruel. :D I would do just the same and it is possible while it is dry, but after rain hits, there are just too many of darn things. Also the small ones are even more annoying than big ones, for they are difficult to find and do the tiny holes in the strawberries.

I wonder if putting some wood ash on the leaves would discourage them eat it too? I remember my grandmother used wood ash to get rid of some other bug (Crepidodera aurata), maybe it could also make slug snacks not that very tasty. I might try salt also for the seedling greenhouse, since there is only one way in, so I hope that at least small ones won't make it.

We tried some pellets with iron chloride before and it wasn't all that effective and rather expensive. It kills some of them, but they probably keep coming from the neighbors and fields around, so with repeating it becomes expensive fairly quickly.

I wonder though if to offer them cheap and strong beer, would they die from hangover? It surely can almost kill a human in the next morning! :D

none of this stuff really works apart from the tried and true flashlight method.Copper works for a few times then the snails just get immune. Beer is sort of helpful but you do have to be careful not to trap ground beetles and any of the additions such as bran, eggshells, ash...are just laughed at. Invest in a headlamp. I collect mine in a pot and take them away, crossing at least one major road. In my younger, more callous days, I used to throw them up in the air and them bat them with a cricket bat....straight into a garage wall. I used to give myself points for hitting them, points for hitting the wall and points for total destruction. It is true though, that after a few weeks of this, the numbers are significantly reduced. Nowadays, even when wet, I am lucky to find 2 or 3 and the real benefits come the following year when the population is practically nil. Although, this really only works with snails. The big slugs are good guys but the little keeled slugs that live in the soil are a real pest. You could try nematodes - expensive but very effective when the temoeratures are right against the soil-dwelling slugs. In the greenhouse, if nowhere else, a night patrol is essential since a whole tray of seedlings can disappear overnight. Cheers, Suzy

elemire, tuck horticultural fleece around the strawbs - it works better then nets (and keeps marauding birds off too, and is cheaper and easier to use than netting. it really helps if you can raise the strawbs off the ground with either straw or woodchips. mine are just ripening now - yum. Tenira, Cambridge Late Pine, gariguette.

I've heard that ducks love slugs. Can you borrow some ducks?

Look for a product called SLUGGO

Buford, we actually have a flock of wild ones scavenging through the village (when they are not lazy to leave a pond near school, and they usually are lazy), but I don't think they eat anything in the gardens, apart fine bread offered by the people. They are spoiled, fat birds, what can I say.

Campanula, I am not very familiar with the slug kinds, are those dark brown big ones harmless? Then I got some smaller ones that look similar (young?) and some size of fingernail, which seem to eat a lot of vegetable/fruit. Those small ones are the biggest problem, since you can't effectively gather them. I will look at the horticultural fleece, still have some at home not used, although birds seem to be indifferent to strawbs here (they prolly get stuffed with worms and slugs before they come to berries).

I just today saw that diatomaceous earth is good against insects and slugs.

"This fossilized skeletons of tiny aquatic organisms. When untreated, the razor sharp edges of this mined product scratch the exoskeletons of hard bodied insects, making them susceptible to fatal attack from natural organisms in the soil."

* A non-toxic, safe substance made up from fossils of freshwater organisms and crushed to a fine powder.
* Deadly to any insect or larvae
* D.E is completely harmless to all animals, fish, birds or in food

Sherry

Doesn't DE have to be reapplied after each rain, or something?

DE is what I was about to recommend although I know no personal testimonies regarding it's effectiveness. It is, however, harmless to try. I used it under my mulch on my new hosta area to also control earwigs. Problem is I have no control for comparison so I am likely just doing it to make myself feel better. :o)

I've been finding many snails in the garden this season too. I planted some verbascum this year and they are eating it up like a salad and making this plant look awful. The rest of my plants are not being harmed, but I do find them climbing the roses every now and then. I wish I could just step on them, but they gross me out, so I just toss them in the trash when I see them.

Juliet

"Sluggo" is an organic substance made of iron, we've used lots of other methods but none were nearly as effective as
"Sluggo". It was first marketed in Germany, and may be sold under another name in the Netherlands.
I used salt, copper borderings, beer traps and all of them together worked cnly c. 20% as well as Sluggo against slugs and snails.

you only need to use a little bit of Sluggo to be effective, follow the directions. I used 3 times too much the first time I used it, in my zeal to get rid of hundreds of snails, and my cat ate a clump of Sluggo, (the iron in it may have smelled like blood to my cat) and she vomited, though she was otherwise not hurt. I'm a big fan of Sluggo, and would not be able to grow violets without it. My curious cat never ate Sluggo again after that first time when I had mistakenly put a large clump of it in my garden.

Luxrosa

Another vote for Sluggo. It even wipes out the huge yellow banana slugs we have in abundance here in Pacifica.

Now if I could just find something to chase away the squirrels that eat my roses. My cat is not interested in hunting them.

Diane

When we first moved here we had lots of slugs. We found the Sluggo product and for 1 1/2 we had no slugs. They are coming back now..so we are sprinking it around

I used rinsed, dried and lightly crumbled egg shells to protect my delphiniums. Seems to work just fine at keeping the slugs away. The sharp edges slice into the bellies of the slimy monsters. Nice.

Egg shells seem to be harmless to try, since I am a bit reluctant to use chemicals near stuff that we intend to eat, especially with a toddler in the house.

We also have some sea shells for sale, which are commonly used here for the paths, might work too as slug repellent if they are indeed not happy to walk over that kind of surfaces. I should pay more attention when going for a walk next time, since we have that kind of pathing in some forest areas and I can't recall seeing slugs on those paths (when on tiles or asphalt they are abundant).

I am from the PNW and have much experience with slugs. I love sluggo, but for an instant and satifying kill, I prefer Amonia. Put one quarter cup in a 24 oz spay bottle and spray it on the slugs. Kills them and is good for the soil. I highly recommend it.
Kathy

essentially, only removal really works - all these defence/barrier things work FOR A SHORT PERIOD then the slugs and snails get immune or just don't care. For all the vigilance you need to keep reapplying stuff like eggshells and DE (coffee grounds, bran, grit, hair etc.) you may as well just gather them up and take them away. However, I am not an avid killer of these animals anymore because the casual use of slug pellets has been a huge factor in the disappearance of hedgehogs from our environment. Don't know if you have them in the US but here, in the UK, the hedgehog population has declined catastrophically since we humans are, again, interfering with the food chain. Also, pellets are a particularly horrible way to kill a snail or slug and the effects are distributed throughout the rest of the chain which relies on these molluscs (even the so-called non-toxic 'organic' sorts). So catch and quickly squash or take them somewhere else.

I don't know what it is with my garden, but something attracts them slimy things. One month later, gathering slugs and after each rain I literally collect about a 2 liter can of big fat slug monstrosities. I have suspicious feeling also that clover in our "lawn" significantly attracts them, since I always find a lot of them chewing on it.

Horrible thing is that they now completely destroyed one new clematis and are significantly damaging even the old one which was cut back - half of the new shots are gone and they were not tiny by all means. Since I would hate to loose a 20-year old clematis, I suppose I better try some bait thing at least locally around it, hope it works.

In Netherlands you probably have Neudorff's Ferramol available, and it's worth trying again in my opinion. It's much the same stuff as Sluggo. It works very well against all sort of snails without shell. The ones with shell tend not to spend time enough on the ground to attract them.

It does help to pick them. Check dailias daily, the are slug magnets. A piece of honey or canatalupe melon is really (!!!) effective too, if you have time to check now and then and pick them.

Iron sulphate and picking really helps, and pretty fast too. Withing a short week I can go from mass invation and picking about 100 a night to hardly find any.

This is what I do, and it works very well here. Ferramol has been around for ages and does well in tests.

There's the nematodes you water into the ground, some regard these as the most effective in the long run, but you haveI to keep it up for a couple of years.

Best of luck with the slugs. It doesn't have to take a long time for you to notice major improvement :-)