Growing your own vegetables can be rewarding, with even small crops providing a good haul for your dinner table. Popular items that can be easy to grow include salad leaves and greens, courgettes, peas or strawberries, but the problem is slugs love them too.
In just a few hours or overnight, slugs and snails reduce healthy young plants to nothing but stems leaving your vegetables unhealthy and unable to grow back in many cases.
These pesky garden visitors will also eat a crop of ripe strawberries before you get a chance to pick them for yourself.
Although slugs are an important part of the eco system as many birds and other animals eat them, outdoor spaces can become overrun with these gastropod creatures causing havoc for gardeners.
Experts say that slug pellets, even organic types, can be harmful to wildlife in your gardens, but help is at hand with kitchen scrap items.
Eggshells have been found to be effective at deterring slugs from your garden crops.
It’s a tried and tested method with gardeners cleaning then crushing the eggshells and adding them to the base of targeting plants.
The eggshell method helps to prevent slugs from getting to the fruit and leaves of the plant.
Some gardeners that have tried this method have left the egg shells in halves – leaving a large sharp edged barrier around the plant and this has proved effective.
Slugs do not like manoeuvring over the serrated edges – and that’s why it works at keeping them away.
However, after rain, the eggshell method can be less effective as they become slippery.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has detailed another natural method that may also work to keep the slugs from your vegetables.
On their website, RHS reported: “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.”
These natural traps will attract the mollusc creatures away from your edible crops, allowing the salad, vegetables and strawberry fruit to grow without it being nibbled.
There is also a biological control method that won’t harm other wildlife in your garden or outdoor space.
‘Nemaslug’ is an organic product made up of extremely tiny worms, the product can be watered into the soil.
These worms are known as nematodes – they enter the slugs bodies and infect the slimy gastropods with a bacteria which causes a fatal disease.