Golly darn!!

==>>>

such language gal ... crikey ... lol ...

i dont know if its really a failure.. you suspected it would happen .. you knew it would happened.. it happened .. regardless of every solution you tried ...

how is that failure ... ???

i call it responding to a challenge .. the key being taking up the challenge ... whether you lost or not.. you tried.. so you learned something ... so chalk it up to experience ...

do you have any luck keeping slugs out of hanging baskets.. or do they fly up the in the PNW also ... wouldnt surprise me.. lol

keep up gods work.. and watch the language .... lol

ken

My language would be more fierce, I'm certain! Have you tried using crushed oyster shells around the plants? The sharp edges should deter the critters, as their soft bodies won't like that.

LOL!! I cleaned it up for public consumption :-) You should have heard what I said when I took the dog out this morning and saw the most recent devastation! My mother is turning in her grave!!

I guess I am spoiled as I rarely encounter any plant issues that are not my fault. Almost no diseases of concern, insect activity acceptable and within bounds and I can deal with the deer as their visits are infrequent and the repellant spray works. But the slugs have got me beat - there are just SO many of them and they just keep coming! My apocalypse is not a plague of locusts.....it's a plague of slugs!

Sometimes I do think they fall out of the sky :-) Especially when they can find their way so easily to containers I go out of my way to place out of harm's way as best I can. So far my single hanging basket has been safe........but I am not holding my breath.

Aren’t your slugs big enough to carry the pots to their buddies and then return them like nothing happened?

After watering I would give the soil (not the leaves) a cup or two of the 10% ammonia water to get the slugs you know are lurking there.

tj

"Aren’t your slugs big enough to carry the pots to their buddies and then return them like nothing happened?"

LOL!! Some of them might be :-) I sliced one in half last week that was at least 7 inches long and an inch plus in diameter. No doubt that husky from eating all my plants!!! What was fascinating was watching him/her/it continue to slither across the patio with most of his insides outside. Even almost complete dismemberment does not kill these suckers.

I'll try the ammonia soil drench and see if that helps.

You have to go through your entire yard, pick out all the slugs by hand... and then "relocate" them.

Slugs often like to hide in tall grass or under sprawling bushes, where they have moist plant cover near the ground. If you maintain your yard in a certain you can avoid the conditions that slugs thrive in.

It is possible to deal with slugs without poisons, but it takes some planning and a lot of work/labor and more effort.

These days a lot of people are just looking for some magic spray.

Oh I know gal is not looking for a magic spray, unless its a spray from a semi-auto rifle. You see, her slugs are big enough to drive a bus load of their buddies to various diners.

tj

I have to say that I find it odd that anyone who lives in this area is suggesting I 'relocate' slugs!! Or that I am not maintaining my yard correctly! Seriously??

I live surrounded by woods. It is not possible to maintain a garden like mine in this area without encountering slugs - sometimes monumentally big ones - everywhere. They do not require any sort of cover to survive........I see them crawling across pathways and my patio in broad daylight. And the idea of relocating them is absurd! Relocate to where exactly?

And I don't use "poisons" nor am I looking for a "magic spray". Sluggo is an organic control and even ammonia is a commonly enough encountered soil component (although not necessarily in a form suitable for slug control). When I lived in the city, I'd toss them into the street to either cook in the sun or get smushed by a passing car. Now I just chop them up when I find them.

I am not looking for any lectures, thank you very much! The point of my post was to comment on the slugs apparent love for petunias above just about anything else I grow and how they seem to magically appear in vast numbers when these very seasonal plants are introduced. How do they know??

Can you eat them? Maybe sautee them in a wine-butter sauce, or batter and deep fry? Might as well make use of them -- they're pretty much snails without shells, right?

Thx, mxk3. That may be one of the most creative slug control solutions I've encountered but slugs are not nearly as succulent as snails :-) Far too chewy for my tastes......like eating rubber bands. And too much interior goo (for lack of a better term) to be very appetizing. Otherwise some enterprising PNW'er - and there's a lot of them here - would have started up a fried slugs for dinner chain. There's plenty of raw ingredients around for the taking!!

Now if I could rent a herd of ducks or geese, we might be in business!

I know exactly what you're going through, gg. People who don't live in gastropod country really don't understand. They are the top pest in UK gardens. My latest loss was two dozen newly planted lettuces. Gone completely overnight. As well as slugs I have these:

Relocation does not work. Research has shown they have a homing instinct. It is simply impossible to remove them all by hand. There are thousands of them. You can reduce the numbers a bit but you can never win. It has nothing to do with poor maintenance.

Thanks, floral....someone who truly understands :-) This is the reason I don't grow more veg. Not gonna start up a free salad bar for slugs and snails! And yes, I have those as well but not in the enormous numbers of the slug population, so they are easy to hand pick.

A local gardening blog had an article on slugs and said this: "You’ll never be able to eliminate all of the slugs in your garden—as proved by one English zoologist who systematically removed 400 slugs from a quarter-acre garden each night for several years without any observable effect on the population.”

I may just have to give up growing hostas and petunias. The slugs don't seem to be nearly as interested in devouring most of my other plants and any damage is manageable or more easily overlooked.

Gal you may be first person I know who actually tried slugs.

BTW chickens love them too. My brother has a huge hosta garden and occationlly lets his chickens free range there. Makes quite a mess of his mulch but there’s no slugs.

tj

Hostas! Don't make me laugh. I own a single pampered individual kept in a raised pot and hedged about with every conceivable prophylactic. I think the snails do indeed fly through the air when they detect hosta on the wind.

Perhaps a hosta variety other than ’Mollusk Meal’ is in order?

tj

^^ Is there one? Some get attacked worse than others but they all wind up shredded by the end of summer. And some are placed where I cannot conceive of slugs reaching them without aerial acrobatics.......but they still manage.

Ugh, I have to say I had some trouble getting through this thread lol! I thought reading about a 7-inch slug was bad enough, but then we got to eating them and that was just too much for me lol.

Anyway, I literally just got in from the garden where I just put tuna cans full of beer around my dahlias. This helps with slug damage as they much rather would have the beer. It's disgusting in the morning when I go out and the can is FULL of dead slugs - but perhaps some of you here would just say, "Hmm, breakfast!" haha!

So, I'm not sure if this is a solution that could work in pots - guess it depends on big your pots are. Perhaps a smaller container could work. The container needs to be level with the soil and those suckers jump right in. I've had 17 in a tuna can at times.

Good luck! Hope you find a solution!

:)

Dee

Dee, I have good luck with the beer, too. Slugs are so gross! I've been dealing with them on new roses this year. Never thought I'd find myself in the garden with a flashlight smushing the buggers. My neighbors always suspected I was a little crazy about the garden. Now they think I am just crazy.

gg: I have never had slugs on my petunias, and I grow gobs of them in almost every bed. Last year I had caterpillars and cutworms eating them. Never had that problem before, or I just didn't notice.

A sample ....

I don't grow Petunias but I have Calibrachoa which isn't affected.

I hand pick slugs and snails almost every day in my Massachchusetts garden...often hundreds in a day. ive tried sluggo and beer, no luck with either. The hand picking barely makes a dent...i put them in a dish of salt to dispatch them. in fact, im going to go do this right now! Phlox seems to be their favorite, but they will eat anything. Weirdly, they hardly touch my hostas.

Slugs are just a part of gardening in the northwest. Not that that's news to you gg,just commiserating. We buy Sluggo in 40 pound bags and go through a bag a year. If I do it every week, I can keep it to a dull roar, but you can never get them all. My wife and I have a gruesome song we sing about them that I will not repeat on a public forum as it deals with treating mothers and babies poorly...of slugs only!

I was watching the most recent episode of Gardener's World and Monty Don was talking about hostas. He has come to the conclusion that slugs and snails only bother hostas that are under stress.....a healthy and robust hosta will not be appealing to them.

I grow all of mine in containers and they sure appear to be healthy, robust and stress free. Just heavily mangled by slugs :-( I am therefore not putting much weight into his observations.

Because I can't stand looking at the shredded, bedraggled things, I am moving them to a less visible part of my garden where slugs - so far - have not been a big issue. We'll see if that helps.

I’ve never much liked M Don and now I know for sure he’s a fool. The only stress my Hosta is under is the gastropod hordes.

In my neck of the woods the slugs are of the tiny variety. But they are plentiful and destructive. I’ve noticed they will destroy marigolds and love dahlias. Ammonia is my best weapon though i find it increasingly difficult to find in the stores.

Sorry to hear you've got slugs too! Ugh they're the worst! There is a farm behind my house so we just always wind up with lots of critters. I did buy some sluggo and I probably went a little nuts with it but they had just eaten all of my zinnia seedlings down to stems and I had enough! I also dug holes and put tin cans in them at ground level and then filled the cans with beer. 3 days after the sluggo application and I was pretty much slugless. (Dont let them hear I said that!) And I had huge slugs that were 7 to 10 inches long. I will admit that I was going out there nightly and pouring salt on the ones that were on the sidewalk and that I've picked off so many snails it's insane. But I've had great success with sluggo so far. I'm sure they'll be back, so I'm getting another can of sluggo because that stuff really seems to work. I also like that it's not harmful because I've got dogs. My mom has also been saving all the eggshells and those go around any plant I'm really trying to protect, but I'm not sure if the eggshell thing is just an urban myth or not but it does seem to deter them.

GG & other northwest/coastal gardeners,

Do you have banana slugs. I've only seen photos of them years ago, but the image & feeling of revulsion is so strong it's as though I saw them an hour ago, I'm not generally squeamish, but something about slimy, cold and venturing out at night for your prey (even if it's an inanimate member of the vegetable kingdom) gives me the creeps.

Yes :-) They kinda freak me out as well as they are big and usually brightly colored. But they tend to be more forest dwelling while the biggest cultivated garden culprits are non-native leopard or the black, brown or gray garden slugs. Because I live surrounded by a mini forest, I see the bananas occasionally but nothing like the other guys!! Banana slugs also tend to be less destructive as they are primarily detritivores or consumers/decomposers of leaves, dead plant material, moss, mushrooms and animal droppings. Although if presented with a cultivated garden banquet for the taking, no doubt they would eat their fill of that as well.

A few years ago I suddenly had leopard slugs here. I actually found them in my basement! I think they had to have come in on a plant...I doubt they are native around here and after finding a half dozen or more I never saw another. They were so big I actually flushed them down the toilet!

ARGH! I let my guard down. I hadn't seen any or many slugs and no damage for a while and thought maybe I didn't need to spread more Sluggo every week. I could take a break. Foolish, foolish man! I went out the other day and they were everywhere. Joyously chewing on day lilies, hosta, ligularias and anything and everything they could find. They have turned my morning walk through the garden from a time to take in the marvelous changes, what's about to bloom, how is the ground cover filling in, to a walk of carnage and destruction. No time to enjoy the clematis blooms, no, it's nothing but stab, squash and toss. I here by swear to spread Sluggo every week, slug evidence or no. Foolish, foolish man.