In Organic gardens , just as in any garden, it’s truly heartbreaking to find your newly planted brassicas have been eaten in the night by slugs and its easy to reach for the slug pellets, but you could do more to diminish the slug population in your garden yourself. After all, slug pellets aren’t the best things for you to eat, and just when the slugs are most active (in wet weather) the pellets are least effective. Slug pellets can also kill some of the most beneficial insects and beetles. Birds and animals eating the dead slugs littered on the surface may also be harmed if you don’t remove them quickly.

The Garden Slug which is a burrower and surface feeder will eat roots and sever plants at the base of the stem while the Keel slug lives underground and attacks roots and potatoes. The huge long slugs that you see do very little damage to your vegetables as they live on rotting vegetation and fungi etc.

If you don’t want to use slug pellets but prefer to practice some kind of Organic Garden Snail & Slug Control then there’s a number of things you can do to diminish the slug populations in your patch.

Thorough cultivation of the soil in spring exposes the slugs and their eggs to traditional predators, but if you practice a no dig method of cultivation, then keep the weeds down, as they are also a food source for slugs.

Beer and milk traps are successful but you have to set the jar into the soil keeping the rim about 1.5cm above ground level to stop helpful beetles etc from crawling in. You must put the traps about one metre apart in a grid layout.

Slug collecting at night is highly helpful in severely cutting down the population in your garden. On a warm humid night you leave the house with a torch and a cane with a lengthy darning needle embedded in one end. Stab the slugs wherever you spot them and shove them into a tin of salt. Sounds disgusting, I know, but very much worth the effort. You may get the most slugs this way.

You can boost the number of beneficial insects that hunt on slugs by placing small wooden boards or roof slates between rows as shelter for predatory beetles and insects. Slugs will also be attracted, and these you can simply remove along with their eggs.

If all this looks a little bit too ‘hands on’ then I recommend you think about a commercial kind of Organic Garden Snail & Slug Control in the form of microscopic worms known as Nematoda.

A natural predator of the slug, these nematodes (or to give them their proper plural, nematoda) are naturally present in their millions in any well balanced garden soil. Nematoda infest the slug by laying their eggs inside its body, so killing the slug during the Nematodes’ reproductive cycle. The Nematoda, when applied to the growing area, swell the natural population of Nematoda in your soil, giving increased natural Organic Garden Snail & Slug Control.

You apply the Nematoda by watering can or by Superspray type garden feeder attached to a hosepipe for larger areas. Once you stop applications the numbers of Nematoda will fall to its original numbers.

You should enjoy up to 6 weeks long lasting control from one application, and Nematoda are harmless for children pets and wildlife. They’re harmless for use on food crops and aren’t adversely affected by rain.

Organic Garden Snail & Slug Control in the Organic gardening vegetable patch is all about keeping the slug count at an absolute minimum and so maximising your return on your vegetable yield.