Home remedies for slugs and 🐌

In my location a 50 lb bag of Sluggo™ is about the same price per lb as table salt, plus it is rated organic and is beneficial to plants.

Sluggo is sh*t in the rain. Otherwise it works great. Put it on wet ground after a week of seattle rain and it looks like the stuff in my compost tumbler. More importantly the slugs slide right past it.

The beauty of ammonia is I can put it in my pump sprayer and mist all the beds in the drizzle. They still dance like bacon on a frying pan.

That’s quite cheap!

At those prices you might be tempted to “over use”

Be carful with over use. I remember reading scientific literature that even the “biological” slug killing pellets harm earth worms.

I still use them. But a little goes a long way. The slugs search out the pellets, you don’t need a continuous line as a barrier. A few pellets here and there does the trick.

From what i heard, the “active ingredient” iron phosphate. Is quite harmless. But to make it effective they add “other” stuff. And that combination can actually be toxic to more than just slugs. There seems to be a “legal loophole” where they don’t have to mention the “other stuff” because it does nothing on it’s own. It is only harmful in combination.
That wasn’t from a scientific source though. So I’m not sure how reliable it is.

TLDR. i use those slug pellets myself. But only just enough, don’t pour them everywhere. Since they probably hurt your earthworms and other organisms a bit.

Sorry @Richard, I could have said that a little more kindly. Stream of consciousness is my weakness…

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The base is grain meal. The “other stuff” only occurs in Sluggo+™ which requires a pesticide applicator license to purchase and is not offered in retail stores. Further, the other stuff is not related to slugs and snails.

@Noddykitty
I have lived among the coastal redwoods and understand the monster slugs and rainfall you are dealing with.

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From MSDS… Super informative :slight_smile:

Sluggo:
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Sluggo+
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In my region Sluggo+ is popular with farmers of annual row crops who battle both snails and ground-level insect eggs + larvae (e.g. growers of leafy vegetables, tomatoes).