Tips to help keep snails and slugs off your veggies and Plants

27 June 2024 69 5

Tips to help keep snails and slugs off your veggies and Plants

This week, our gardening expert give a few tips to help you with one of the banes of gardeners’ lives… slugs and snails!

LISTEN TO ANGELA’S FEATURE!

Angela | Slugs Ginger and Nuts

Written by Angela

Snails are beautiful, but it can be very annoying when you find just a chomped-up stalk where once there had been a lovely lettuce.

However, slugs and snails ‘do’ have their place in the garden as they are natures compost makers; they eat decaying leaves and help to break up and recycle natural debris. Because of this, two years ago, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) decided that slugs and snails were now no longer to be classified as pests!

So, we need to think differently and remember that they’re part of the food chain in our gardens.

With that in mind, here are a few nature-friendly tips to discourage hungry gastropods from eating your prized veggies and plants.

Firstly, grow on your plants for a little longer before planting them out because very young plants are more tender and easier for slugs and snails to eat; when they’re a bit bigger, they’re also a bit hardier.

Try sprinkling ground eggshells around plants or use crushed oyster shells, which last longer.

Other things that can be put around plants to keep slugs and snails at bay are ash, coffee grounds, grit, and even dead bramble sticks, cut up and placed around the base of plants.

Copper tape put around the rims of plant pots and edges of raised beds also helps; it emits a low charge of electricity, and when a slug or snail touches it, it gets a small shock.

Sheeps wool is also an effective natural deterrent that is laid around the base of plants.

You could make a wildlife area in your garden with a pond to create a habitat for various wildlife and insects. It doesn’t have to be a big pond; it can be as small as a washing-up bowl sunk into the ground with a bit of oxygenating weed, some pebbles, and a branch so that small creatures can get out. This will encourage frogs, insects, and birds into your garden and help to keep slug and snail numbers down naturally, as will hedgehogs if you’re lucky enough to have them visit.

You can also leave empty halves of grapefruit-like little yellow domes among your plants and turn them over in the morning to gather any slugs and snails inside them.

And there are beer traps, where slugs climb in for a drink of beer … and never leave.

Lastly, grow a few more plants and veg than you need and plant a few sacrificial plants that slugs prefer, near to your prized ones, in the hope that if the slugs and snails have a choice, they will eat them first!