Re: Slugs

Claire
after some thought, have you tried regular household ammonia or alcohol ? I think it would smother them to death. of course I've never tried this, "thank God I don't have a problem with slugs" yet.
then again, it might damage your plants or plant roots. I thought about putting the ammonia or alcohol in a spray bottle, but the over spray might harm plants, then I thought, an eye dropper or a syringe - that way you could target the little buggers one by one.
just a thought
Donna in NE Mississippi zone 7

ECPep@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 2/19/03 10:46:50 PM Eastern Standard Time, abtrlife@earthlink.net writes:



seems to damage the nervous system.' Unfortunately, they don't say how to come by caffeine - but they do say that 'a cup of instant coffee contains about 0.05 percent caffeine'."


There is an aspirin/caffeine combination sold OTC. Walmart is one source. Health food stores are better yet. 200mg. per tab of caffeine can be purchased OTC and without filtering you save the slug a headache. You can filter out the caffeine on the kitchen counter if you want to go to all that trouble. It would seem to me that if caffeine was an efficacious agent for slaying slugs, it would appear on the market. It is cheap to produce and is a common "booster" in many combined Rx formulas. If it is a contact agent, why would it be any more efficient than the salt shaker? If you have to aim and hit, any kitchen chemical would probably do the job. The good old slug. If we did not have slugs and Japanese beetles and aphids and voles, life would be just too easy. I have an all grey head and for all of the years that I can remember, slugs have been destructive in the garden. A point to remember is that you have a much larger brain than a slug so some of the destruction is lack of planning on our part. If you put a plant you like in a place that the slug likes, you usually lose.

I used to think a bit about slugs and why we tried to kill them as adult populations. Thought that interrupting the breeding cycle would be more humane. Then I thought this does not work in higher life forms, humans for instance so that was discarded. The will to live is powerful in all life forms (except very expensive plants). Next I thought slugs were as deer, increasing in numbers because of human intervention. My mother, age 94, tells me that picking slugs out of her father's garden and dropping them into kerosene was worth a penny a slug. The intervention cause is probably not the reason. Slugs live and die in areas of less than one square yard, also breed in that small area. Dear old Mom also said ducks were employed in cabbage fields to keep down the slugs. Apparently in her youth, finding a slug in a large head of cabbage was not uncommon. You might want to think about dining on duck.
Slugs have no real enemies except the toad. Other slug eaters are not really into hunting slugs, just chance meetings for some snakes. Birds do not like them. So back to caffeine. Very few legitimate chemicals kill slugs unless a direct hit is achieved. The common baits actually stun them. The slug dies from exposure. If he is lucky enough to come to in the rain, he is home free. I think the gardener will always battle slugs. Unless the govt. declares are war on slugs (rhymes with drugs) (when they will then prosper even more) slugs don't even have bad press. The worst thing they do that aggravates the population is appear on a path in rainy weather and cause an innocent to slip and fall from the slug's unfortunate body shape or rather lack of body shape.

Therefore slugs are part of life as is acne, colds, houseflies, papercuts, male pattern baldness, and the human love for anything with ingredients that will kill us.

In the mountains where I live the soils are infected with non-pathogen vectors: gravel, shale, pebbles, rocks, big rocks, etc. I think that this has an effect on slugs. Not an immediate effect but a general environmental effect as we do not have a lot of slug damage. There are slugs but not enough of them for me to become insanely angry as in deer anger or vole anger.

As slugs have proven resistant to viral infections, nematodes, bacterial disease, legal chemicals, do you think a minor chemical as caffeine will do the trick? If so, send private email to me and I will advise you how to separate the caffeine from the the aspirin sold by most chain stores with pharm depts. Any college student can help with this as one of ours assured me whilst entertaining us with his many (unknown to us) achievements.

Trusting that most of this will not be treated too seriously,

Claire Peplowski
NYS z4

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@hort.net with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE PERENNIALS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@hort.net with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE PERENNIALS
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index