Slug control in the garden
At first, I was
puzzled by the
box turtle I photographed for yesterday's post. Why
was she hiding under the sweet potato leaves when the
turtle-friendly zone is currently around the dropped raspberries
fifty feet away? Then I took a look at the turtle's chin and
realized she had been chowing down on slugs.
Some gardeners stop
mulching entirely after a few years because they feel the slug
populations get too high. We have seen an increase in
slugs since we started mulching seriously, but our resident
critters seem to keep them mostly in line. Along with box
turtles, other wildlife I've seen in our garden intent on slug
patrol include skinks, worm snakes,
garter
snakes, ringneck
snakes, shrews, mole
salamanders, wolf
spiders, and even (potentially) some species of slugs.
So far, the benefits
of mulch outweigh the negatives, but I suspect the tables would
turn if we tilled. Chopping up the soil would invariably
also chop up a lot of our slug predators, giving slugs the upper
hand. So maybe the moral is --- either till and don't mulch
or mulch and don't till.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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No WONDER she was so happy! Yummy slugs!
A few weeks ago a lady brought in a five gallon bucket with a lid with holes punched in to the Nature Center on a Sunday. She'd found a snake and she wanted me to identify it. The woman was so very nervous, so I didn't know WHAT I was going to find. While I was prying the lid off the lady admitted she put it on tight because she was afraid the snake would escape. Once I got the lid off I laughed because the snake inside was a Northern Brown. We let him go in the woods, and during the conversation the lady mentioned she had a slug problem. I told her she had just made a huge mistake, since the little guy would be eating them for her. "I'd rather have the slugs."
Some people. Hrmph.