Fortunately this Iris was just a pass along, not a purchase.

This fellow was on the outside of the bathroom window last night ...3 storeys up.

I can commiserate completely :-) Slugs and snails were the bane of my existence at my previous garden. So far I have not see any sign of them at my new place and hoping that it being an all containerized garden will help.

Sounds like a never-ending battle....

Can you just make a meal out of them - a la escargot?

Yep - day and night time patrols (hunt and kill) save my tiny garden (eventually)...but the allotment...bloody hell. Twice as wet as normal, mild winter, gastropod heaven.

My garden is containerised GG - just provides extra hiding spaces (such as under the rim of containers). You could try nematodes though,if you do get an infestation - can work well in containers (I have to do vine weevil nematodes twice a year). No good for protecting the hundreds of seedlings in teeny pots though.

Lost my entire pot of salvia subrotunda so at least I won't be fretting about where to plant 'Giant Brazilian Red'. Mind, also lost an entire seed run of delphinium nudicaule, icelandic poppies, dryas octopetala, teucrium hircanicum, salvia roemeria...

😢

Are these super slugs hybrids, or a pure species? Were UK snails less harmful before the hybrids appeared. The zoos there raise and release your native slugs, but will they have any chance of recolonizing, with so many hybrid super sluggs? The slug away products here are supposed to be environmentally safe, but they are banned in the UK, and considered unsafe.

Floral, that is a sad looking hosta leaf. Darn those slugs. ☹

"The slug away products here are supposed to be environmentally safe, but they are banned in the UK, and considered unsafe."

Iron or ferrous phosphate - the active ingredient in Sluggo and other 'environmentally safe slug and snail controls - are perfectly acceptable and widely used in the UK.

@floraluk2 I feel your pain & sounds like @gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) empathizes too. My first personal garden encounter with slugs & snails was in CA Bay area - first home & first garden. I planted along my patio at least 20 Champagne Bubbles poppies - huge flowers of many pale colors. The next morning I came out to admire my work & not one flower was left - stems eaten right to the ground. I cried - really! We had a tiny front yard & had planted dichondra as a ground cover. I came out early evening a few days after planting & almost fainted. There was a literal HERD of snails munching away. My husband & I each gloved up & spent a good amount of time gathering them up & throwing into coffee cans filled with sudsy water. We each filled a large can. So very gross! You understand why I’ve never forgotten these two experiences! I do now use the Sluggo that GG mentions. I pour it around all my perennials as soon as I see growth peeking up & I rebait weekly. It really helps. I do make sure my pup is inside & can’t see what I’m doing - she’s very curious & nosy. She’s never outside unsupervised either. It is supposed to be pet safe but taking no chances. I keep reading about ammonia soaks on the hosta forum & sounds like pretty successful but it’s too much effort to do that for each plant for me so it would never work for you - especially at your allotment.

The slug products using metaldehyde are banned, but other slug products using less harmful ingredients like iron phosphate aren't banned. I question the effectiveness of the safe pellets? Slugs and snails aren't an issue around here in the midwest. The only time Ive seen damage it was on Hosta. Im surprised that the animal predators of land mullusks are'nt keeping their numbers in check in the UK.

@Jay 6a Chicago I hear a lot of small frogs - tree frogs? - in my yard & have many birds since I’m surrounded by trees & we feed the birds. They don’t seem to be doing the job. Chickens might do it but I’m not up for having them. They are indiscriminate about which plants they eat I think.

The slugs and snails are not hybrids and the common garden snail, Cornu aspersum, does the most damage in my garden. A few minutes hunting ...

I've never heard of any hybrids or zoo releases. Perhaps you can find some references to that. I have frogs in my garden and they make no difference. I do use the safe slug pellets and they are just as effective as the old metaldehyde ones. But since it has rained pretty much every day for weeks they need reapplying constantly. And they are not cheap. I only use them on certain plants. In the ornamental garden it is possible to use resistant plants such as those with hairy leaves. But on the allotment that's not possible. They love emerging Asparagus spears and I no longer attempt to direct sow lettuce, for example. A newly sprouted row will be destroyed in a night. Now I only use transplants so they have a bit of a head start. Animal predators can't keep up. And we've successfully destroyed many predators in the past by putting metaldehyde into the food chain.

I read this article floral.https://theconversation.com/hybrid-super-slugs-are-invading-british-gardens-and-we-cant-stop-them-76335. It could be satire? Well these are slugs, not snails. Are your snails edible? Their slime has anti-aging effects on human skin.

o m g, floral, are those your snails in that hand?! I never had snails until I did a plant trade about 20 years ago and had them introduced into my garden. My snails are about 1/4" size shells when they're full size. :p

Yes, to using sluggo... it works great. A 1:10 ratio ammonia/water spray (direct contact when you can see them) or soak (primarily for getting their eggs) works very well too -- although snails can sometimes escape the ammonia treatment because their shell protects them from getting wet.

Yes, those are our common garden snail, Cornu aspersum, but we have many other for us and also a lot of slug types. Yes, they're edible but nobody eats them. They are slightly smaller than the snails used for escargots.

Due to our frequent rains anything sprayed is ineffective. And anyway, if I can see them I just squash them.

Thanks for the article, Jay. I'm not worrying about these hybrids yet, as the article concluded. It is happening but I've not read anything in the gardening press and mention of the Mail and the Sun undermines the seriousness of the story. They're known for their bias and scare mongering. This article is much less sensational. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091907

I did a three day garden clearing-reorganizing-culling-planting-thing

I work on a double alottment plot,

z7, loam, Switzerland

the slugs are bad here this year as well,

they munched down sprouting Clematis (recta and texensis-hybrid)

and while weeding I discovered three lovely, newly planted Aster pyrenaeus from last fall, their emerging shoots rasped down

I cleared some feral Crosusses and weeds, everything to get the bed "airy" and sunny, put a layer of gritty stuff around them and applied some slug pellets all over the place

I often watched that plants in a dry sunny spot like on my tiny slope do very well

the ones sqished by weeds or a lot of tulip foliage suffer as this difference in micro climate is enough for the slugs to become lethal

Oh yes. Clematis! I can't cut them down in spring because they get eaten to nothing. I have to leave them at least a meter tall if they are to survive.

Daffodil and snowdrop flowers are also favourites.

i can usually manage a few more words than this, my first response:

gross

or

sluggo

really, my rabbit problems pale in comparison

Slugs are my number one non-climate issue, too. I have tiny slugs less than 1/8" literally too small for me to easily see, destroying every single seedling as they germinate in my raised veggie beds. We don't have the big 5" slugs here like in Seattle, the adults here are never over 1.5", but these little ones are worse, much more difficult to hunt (and I hunt, boy do I hunt!) but they seem to do just as much damage as the big ones. It doesn't take much of a slug to demolish a radish seedling the first day after it germinates!

In my Seattle garden it was woodlice destroying my seedlings, so here in Oregon I built my raised beds with concrete block instead of wood, to discourage woodlice. It worked, no woodlice at all --but the slugs have picked up the torch and are sprinting with it!

My sympathies! Here the slugs are smaller but arrive in multitudes in July. As of yet, no snails in my garden.

For years, I dilute my leftover coffee each morning and pour over foliage of hostas, lupines, rhododendrons, anything that doesnt mind a little acid. It helps in my garden. Even if i give up coffee i would still buy cheap stuff for that purpose. Grounds on the soil did not help in my garden.

also, a very healthy population of ground beetles arrived a few years ago and has been helping me out.

Wow, my day just improved. I now have something to be very grateful for. Rabbits destroyed 80% of my 10 years worth of collecting Epimediums last year. But I'll take the rabbits over slugs and snails any day!

So sorry for all of you fighting with them. And they have that protective shell!

We have had a lot of rain this year too - and are about 8 inches above normal for the year so far, but I'm just happy with all the benefit it seems to be having on my garden and don't have to worry about how much happier the snail population becomes. Gee you can't even get a cat for them. I like the chicken idea. There was a TV program where a gardener developed a chicken house on wheels and he would move the house and a surrounding portable fence set up every day and let the chickens help keep the population of bugs down. Just a thought. Would goats eat snalis? They are said to eat anything. Maybe you could borrow one for a week. [g]

Prairiemoon, that’s a good idea for a small business…. a chicken renter. Have a travelling chicken brought in temporarily to clean up a slug or snail problem! A goat rental would be good too, especially for me, because I’ve got slightly wild areas that could use cleanup. lol!

In our area, I'm not so sure there is enough of a snail problem to sustain a business, but...sounds like in places like the UK and Seattle it might be a little niche business.

Here in the northeast we used to have canadian geese congregating on every open grassy area, making a mess, and someone came up with the idea of renting sheep herding dogs...and that worked quite well. Of course, not that many people have trained sheep herding dogs...[g] But whoever did, had a lot of business from towns and golf courses.

That's clever to use herding dogs for the geese, but exactly where did they herd them to? lol!

The Seattle Seahawks have a team dog dedicated to keeping their lakeside practice field free of Canadian geese and goose poop. Turf had the title of "Wildlife Manager and Irrigation Specialist" and was a chocolate Lab. Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer but that position has been filled by a new Lab puppy, Rye, who currently has the title of Junior Wildlife Manager.

Goats would not be a good choice for slug and snail control. I'm not sure their appetite extends to gastropods but even if it did, it wouldn't stop there - they'd eat everything in your garden!! Much worse than a few slug and snail munches. Ducks would be my first choice - they LOVE slugs (dunno about snails) - but not every garden can accommodate a herd of ducks, even if allowed.

I am reluctant to even discuss this topic for fear of jinxing things but so far, my new garden shows no sign of any mollusk infestation. That's not to say I didn't transport some slug or snail eggs with my containers to the new place but so far, no signs of any munching! But they do seem to have a habit of spontaneous generation and appear from out of nowhere so I'm not going to hold my breath.

IME, not all PNW gardens are necessarily plagued by these creatures. Some seem to be less affected than others. My worst experience was at my previous, shady, surrounded by woods garden that had much too favorable conditions for them to thrive as well as an infinite number of hiding places. Other gardens not so much.

Good question PMusic....lol. I don't think they herd them TO somewhere, they just get them off the grass and encourage them to fly away.

Thanks GGal, for that very clear contribution about some of these options. Yes, I was only half serious about the goats, because they do eat anything and everything. And you reminded me that ducks are better than chickens for some things. as a matter of fact, I think it was Eliot Coleman in his book on Organics that he explained about the moveable house he made...and I think it was for ducks and not chickens. I think he called it Ducky Palace? [g]

I went looking for info but all I came up with was this article by someone who used ducks for pests in the garden, after reading Eliot Coleman's book...

When you love a duck...

@prairiemoon2 z6b MA What a wonderful and sweet story about the little duckling that was saved! Thank you for posting the link to it.

KW - I just found it looking for a photo of the portable duck house today. I love that story too!

prairie - are you planning to get some ducks? I know they don’t crow like roosters do but I’ll bet their constant quacking could drive one - well, you know - quackers! 🤭

I'll post again about the coffee, since I found an article about it: (the soil scientist quoted is named Linda Brewer :))

Again, my experience is with diluted coffee poured on the leaves being protective, but is similar to what the excerpt talks about.

https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/used-appropriately-coffee-grounds-improve-soil-and-kill-slugs#:~:text=CORVALLIS%2C%20Ore.,as%20an%20effective%20slug%20killer.

Excerpt:

Perhaps more exciting than the positive effect of coffee grounds as a compost and soil amendment, is its potential as a slug killer, Brewer said. Research shows that using a 1% to 2% solution mixed with water as a soil drench caused 100% of slugs to leave the treated soil and subsequently die of caffeine poisoning. A 2% solution of caffeine applied to the growing medium of orchids killed 95% of orchid snails and gave better control than a liquid metaldehyde product – the common slug bait.

To make a 1% to 2% soil drench add 1-part water to 2-parts strong brewed coffee. For example, use 1 cup water to 2 cups of coffee. To reduce slug feeding on foliage, add 9-parts water to 1-part brewed coffee and apply as a spray.

“A sensible approach would be to apply diluted coffee to a sample of leaves and wait for a few hot and sunny days to watch for leaf burn or other damage,” Brewer said. “If there’s no damage, go ahead with spraying.”

KW - No, no ducks for me. The garden and our daughter's dog part time is enough to take care of for us...lol.

Interesting about the coffee, if anyone tries it, would love to hear how it works.

Sadly slugs and snails are not deterred by coffee grounds around plants. They happily attack my hostas even when the soil is entirely covered in them. https://www.gardenmyths.com/getting-rid-slugs-coffee-grounds/

As for spraying coffee on foliage, I believe the experiments were done with a caffeine solution, not brewed coffee. And in a wet climate spraying anything is a hiding to nothing. I'd be applying it everyday.

I've just removed three of my giant garden snails from a clematis obelisk. I cleared it yesterday too. And the day before ...

I'm sure you have done research and have tried a number of things, but don't give up, all you need is ONE way that works. Seek and you shall find.... 🙂

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