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[SHADEGARDENS] Slugs

Dear Slug-Hating Friends,

Over the years I have tried many remedies for slugs and now I'd like to
recommend two of them for your consideration.

1) Copper foil rings.  If you have plants whose leaves do not touch the
ground, you can surround the base of the plant with a thick copper foil
circle that sticks up from the mulch.  Slugs will not cross a copper
barrier, although whether it is a small electric current or the taste of
copper is still in dispute.  Personally I think it is the taste of
copper because aluminum doesn't work and it ought to produce a small
electric current too, if that is the repellent mechanism.  This works
extremely well for hostas with an upright clump habit.  I use 2" copper
foil which can be purchased in 100' lengths.  My neighbors wonder about
the copper circles in the spring, but they work.  (With thanks to Bob
Olson, President of the American Hosta Society, who first suggested this
works.)

2) Tweezers and soapy water.  Last year, modern history's greatest hosta
hybridizer, Paul Aden, suggested on the AHS Hosta Robin that the very
best way to deal with slugs was to pluck them off the plant with
tweezers and plunge them into a jar of soapy water.  This kills the
slugs, but prevents any damage at all to the leaves.  Starting last
spring, I took my morning and evening garden strolls with a small glass
jar and a pair of tissue forceps instead of my normal cup of coffee.
After I broke myself of the habit of trying to drink my soapy slug stew,
this worked wonderfully.  By mid-June, I had only tiny slugs in the
garden and by July, I didn't see any more for the remainder of the
season.  My hostas were largely free of slug damage through until frost.
 I probably picked about 2 gallons of slugs in the spring (and put them
on my compost pile).  So long as the visual aspects of this don't bother
you, it has the advantage of actually removing and killing the little
horrors as you find them.

This season I have hopes of noting a reduced slug population from the
start, but I've my tweezers and jar waiting at the ready.

I don't like: salt, because it goes into the soil; vinegar, because it
damages some hosta leaves; slug bait, because my garden is just too big
to get adequate coverage; chickens, because local zoning prohibits it;
and beer because it is too inefficient if the slugs start to multiply.

Cheers,
Steve Chamberlain
Manlius, NY
Zone 5-
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