Some people hang around the local Starbucks shops and get discards by the mega bag full. There have been many threads on the topic. Here's just one:

-Babka

Here is a link that might be useful: Coffe Grounds for slugs

That information is incorrect. Caffeine, in larger concentrations than exist in your morning coffee, will repel slugs but it will not kill them. The UCG from Starbucks are a great source of Nitrogen, but not effective as a molluscide.

Steve

Here's an excellent article by Linda Chalker-Scott about the gardening benefits of coffee grounds used as compost. Not a whisper about using it for slugs/snails....

Pieter

Here is a link that might be useful: Coffee grounds as soil amendment

Darn and I thought I wouldn't have to go out at night anymore with my flashlight and scissors. But the grounds with help amend the soil regardless and the hostas should like that since the grounds have a low Ph.

Scott

I've used the starbucks grounds to make rings around the hosta. Worked pretty good...until the first rain or watering, after which it ws completely ineffective. I'm sticking with the headlamp and diluted ammonia, I'm afraid.

Well, I read the Organic Gardening thread and bumped it up to make it easier to visit.

I also followed a couple of links to something called SLUG-SNUB but I'm a little suspicious because it seems hard to pin down the company making it.

And I had wondered if nicotine from tobacco might work as well as caffeine. For if it did, I'd be willing to buy a pack and blender them up, filters and all, and make a nicotine tea for the slimy critters. Still, having a pound of Cajun dark-roast freshly ground sprinkled over the containers might be some help, and I'll have to check it out.

In one spot, it was mentioned about copper tape not working very well. I had wondered why Pietrje's pots had a shiny metal tape near the top, and perhaps this feature serves as a built-in slug/snail barrier.

Anyway, I have the ammonia at hand now, and might even try the same sort of remedy suggested for fleas (also a problem down south when we have warm winters) by filling a hose sprayer with Ivory liquid detergent with a dash of liquid softener, treat the whole lawn and then repeat in two weeks to kill the eggs.

Okay, time to go to bed again. How did it get so late so quickly.....

Copper tape works well. It gives the slimeys a little electric zap and they stay away from it. In containers it should be fine, but in the ground the reality is that many Hosta's leaves will touch the ground, thus giving slugs a pathway over the barrier. The other thing is that copper is expensive. Hard to do copper barriers for 250+ plants.

Steve

Here is a link that might be useful: Slug Shield

Although the article below is in Dutch, pictures are universal and they show the efficacy of using copper barriers very well.

Pieter

Here is a link that might be useful: Using copper for slug/snail control

Pieter, I noticed the shiny metallic bands around the rims of some large pots in your photos. Would that be copper tape?

At the site you linked:
The copper pipe is at the top of hardware cloth barrier or wall. The slugs I am finding here would slip between the hardware cloth holes and bypass the pipe. It would take what I refer to as "mosquito screening" to stop these tiny slugs from getting inside my line of defence.

I'm thinking about the bottom paint we once used on our boats, containing cuprous oxide I think it was, which could repel (or was it kill) barnacles but it was sort of poisonous to other marine life, and seems to be banned these days. I never imagined that having actual metallic copper would be effective against snails and slugs. I'll have to think about that for a while.

I do not know if it is true in other parts of the country or not, but many homes here have been vandalized by stripping out all the copper tubing and pipes and wiring. What a painful experience if they harmed hosta ripping off the copper tapes from their containers!

if you take the link from piet.. and go to google.. and precede the link with the word 'translate' ... you will end up with what is at the link below ...

ken

Here is a link that might be useful: link

ML, if you saw those 'metal strips' on some of my larger post in my Photobucket album, all that is is duc-tape to hold a split pot together. While I certainly DO have slugs and snails here on the We(s)tcoast, by and large I tend to live them and mostly leave it for the robins to do their bit. I will occasionally go slug hunting and do a-periodic Sluggo application, but I don't bother with copper barriers.

Pieter