Get them off the ground!

The Garden Pooter!

I made little tables out of pallets and place them on those. My first year I had them on the ground and YUCK!, they found them real easy.

Mind you, a determined slug is quite the creature and sometimes they even make it to the containers on the tables. Checking often is the key.

Sometimes they are difficult to find once they are in there. One of their favourite places is right inside the drainage holes all snug in the moist soil snoozing. That's a hard place to get them out of, so I always have a spray bottle of amonia handy. Now don't spray this on your seedlings - mature plants OK. Dilute one part amonia to 10 parts water and spray directly on the creature. Don't watch what happens to them if you are queasy. BTW, amonia is nitrogen.

Good Luck!

If you can't put them up high then spread some sand on the ground under and around them. Slugs can't stand the stuff! It is like slithering on glass to the little buggers!

If you don't have any sand available, wood ashes from your stove or fireplaces should also deter creepy crawlers.

... and in case you didn't know, Windex and similar cleaners are mild ammonia formulas, high in nitrogen as Tiffy said, and can be sprayed directly on slugs to disintegrate them.

Thanks for the ideas. I have some pallets and bricks so we can make some table things. I actually went on a hunt tonight with my flash light and a bottle of diluted amonia. I found three slugs in one container with one on the bottom. Several others had one or two in them. It seems like they like the coneflower and gaillardias.

last year i had success by sprinkling sluggo on the ground underneath my w.s. containers ... i didn't have to replenish the sluggo unless a heavy rain washed it away ... i also have a squirt bottle of diluted ammonia water always at the ready!

phyl

As long as rain doesn't wash it away completely, as in washing out of the soil and down a drain, rain doesn't reduce the effectiveness of Sluggo. It remains effective for 2 or 3 weeks. It doesn't kill off all slugs, but seems to reduce the population a lot. Generally they are only a problem for me in wet spring weather. By summer things tend to dry out and I don't see many slugs.

Karen