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Slugs,Composting

Slugs: Best defense is to keep your garden free of attractive hiding
places. Clean any debris and keep it far away from the garden. Next defense
is traps and handpicking, which you are doing. Traps work especially well
if you get out early in the morning or look late at night with a
flashlight. Cat/dog food in a butter tub with an entrance hole and lid is
also a good trap.

Try a beer trap. Get a dish that is deep enough to hold a few slugs but
shallow enough to easily bury to the rim. Fill the dish 3/4 full with beer.
Check it every few days and remove dead slugs and refresh the beer. There
is a fairly good article in this month's issue of Kitchen Garden magazine
that is almost entirely organic.

To dispose of slugs the Kitchen Garden article suggested throwing them in
your compost pile. I'd also suggest putting them in a tray bird feeder. Of
course you can also bury them. We generally just throw them in the garbage
without killing them. Haven't seen one escape yet.

Compost: paper towels, napkins, shredded newspaper, shredded cardboard,
dryer lint, cat/dog hair, shredded/soaked cardboard egg cartons, egg
shells, kitchen scraps (not meat or fat), lawn clippings, coffee grounds,
tea and tea bags, pet rabbit and rat droppings all go into our compost
pile. Plus we found a great bonus at a local coffee roaster: the chaf from
the coffee beans that comes off when the coffee is roasted. Nice, light,
tan material that we're also going to use in place of peat this year. As
for the cardboard that contained food, I'd be careful there. Most container
for wet foods are lined with plastic and or held items that contained meat
or fat. Boxes that held dry goods might be okay as long as they aren't
lined, but I'd check to make sure the ink is soy based.

I wouldn't use tobacco or cigarette butts. Tobacco can act as a phytotoxin
(plant poison), and the filters in cigarette butts do not decomposed (which
is why I really get pissed off when people just throw their cigarette butts
out the window or on the ground or at the beach. I even saw a cigarette but
5 miles into a backwoods trail). You can make a bug spray out of tobacco,
I'll see if I can find the recipe. I personally wouldn't use it though
because of the dangerous aspects of processed tobacco.

Natalie McNair-Huff
Happily Gardening in Tacoma, WA Sunset zone 5; USDA Zone 7/8
Publisher/Editor Mac Net Journal http://www.blol.com/web_mnj/
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