Slugs and snails can be a real nuisance in the garden and can quickly decimate your vegetable crops, but there is a simple household item that can help keep them at bay
Growing your own veggies can be a rewarding endeavour, with even modest yields providing a hearty bounty for your dinner table. Easy-to-grow favourites include salad leaves and greens, courgettes, peas or strawberries, but the snag is that slugs are rather fond of them too.
In just a few hours or overnight, slugs and snails can decimate healthy young plants, leaving nothing but stems and rendering your vegetables unhealthy and often unable to regrow. These pesky garden intruders will also devour a crop of ripe strawberries before you’ve had a chance to harvest them yourself.
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Whilst slugs play an important role in the ecosystem, being a food source for many birds and other animals, they can overrun outdoor spaces and wreak havoc for gardeners.
Experts warn that slug pellets, even organic varieties, can pose a threat to wildlife in your gardens, but there’s a solution to be found in kitchen waste items, reports the Express.
Eggshells have been discovered to be effective at warding off slugs from your garden crops. This tried and tested method involves gardeners cleaning and crushing the eggshells, then adding them to the base of targeted plants.
The eggshell technique helps to prevent slugs from reaching the fruit and leaves of the plant.
Some gardeners who have employed this method have left the egg shells in halves – creating a large sharp-edged barrier around the plant, which has proved successful.
Slugs aren’t fans of navigating over the serrated edges – and that’s why it works at keeping them at bay. However, after a downpour, using eggshells might become less effective as they tend to get slippery.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has highlighted an alternative natural tactic that could be equally effective at deterring slugs from your vegetables.
The RHS suggests on their website: “Traps, such as scooped-out half orange, grapefruit, or melon skins, can be laid out cut side down or jars part-filled with beer and sunk into the soil near vulnerable plants. Check and empty these regularly, preferably every morning.”
By setting these natural traps, you’re likely to draw these slimy pests away from your edible garden, ensuring your salads, veggies, and strawberry fruits can thrive without any unwanted munching.
For those seeking an environmentally friendly solution that doesn’t endanger other wildlife, there’s also a biological control known as ‘Nemaslug’.
This all-natural product contains microscopic worms and is applied by watering into the soil. The nematodes within this product infiltrate the slugs and infect them with a bacteria that leads to a deadly disease for the unwanted visitors.
