Slugs and snails are a nuisance for budding gardeners everywhere – and now one green-fingered expert with royal credentials has shared his top tips for getting rid of them
One of the King’s senior gardeners, who has worked at the monarch’s Highgrove House for 20 years, has revealed the simple four-step method that’ll banish common garden pests.
Green-fingered folk will know what a nuisance slugs and snails can be, taking over outdoors spaces and destroying plants along the way. Luckily help is at hand, courtesy of Jack Stooks, who has spent the last two decades tending to the King’s Tetbury estate. And he has shared his wisdom when it comes to dealing with these slimy menaces – with a four-step method.
First up, Jack advises putting fermented yeast drink traps in the garden. Both slugs and snails are attracted to the odour – and as such they will need regular top-ups. Instead of splashing out on expensive ready-made options, he suggests making your own in jam jars.
“What you do is dig it down into the ground so the top is level with the soil,” he told the Sun. He goes on to say that making your own concoction is simple – you just need to mix water with a tiny amount of sugar and dried yeast. Within a day or two, the slugs and snails will be drawn in.
They can then be emptied out into the compost, and the procedure can then be repeated with a fresh mixture. While the traps are most definitely effective, Jack notes that you might accidentally also catch beneficial wildlife, such as insects, which would help your garden flourish.
So, as an alternative, he recommends actively going out at night time with a torch and picking them up. “These types of animals are attracted to the light from the torch, which makes them easier to catch,” he explains.
Next up, Jack champions the practice of organic gardening – something the King is also known to favour. He explains that an organic garden will encourage wildlife, such as frogs, badgers, hedgehogs and birds, back into your outdoor space – and that, in turn, will help to naturally deter snails and slugs from eating your plants.
And finally, the gardening pro advises using copper collaring. It’s an “easy enough” process that simply requires you to put a copper collar around plant pots or plants themselves. But Jack does point out that this method is “monotonous” and said he instead favours using fermented drink traps out of all his four suggested methods.
Meanwhile, professionals at Rentokil have suggested using a common food item to deter slugs from your garden. Taking to their online blog, they revealed: “Crushed egg shells work as a great home remedy of slugs. This is because slugs don’t like moving across sharp objects, although it isn’t not impossible for them to do, they just prefer not to.”
Smashed up egg shells can then be left around anything from garden plants, to vegetable patches to keep your greenery safe. And the calcium in the shells can benefit the soil too, working to moderate its acidity which is good news for plant growth.
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