Slugs - gastropod mollusks, which in the course of evolution suffered a complete reduction or partial loss of shell. Slugs in the garden are one of the most unpleasant pests, so it will be good to know how to deal with them.
Did you know? Slugs lay eggs for the winter, which you need to remember if you don’t want to receive a new batch of pests in the spring.
Slug: pest description
The slug has an elongated body, ranging in size from 30 mm to 30 cm. Its surface is pale brown in color, but there are bright species: scarlet, orange-red. The body merges with the head, on the back of which is a mantle covering the genitals. The pulmonary orifice is located on the right. In young individuals hatching from overwintered eggs, pale transparent color, and body length is up to 5 mm. For the first 2 weeks of their lives, they use ground humus as food, and then begin to feed on plants, thereby causing them harm. How to destroy slugs irrevocably? This is a question that garden owners constantly face.Causes of slugs in the garden
Many gardeners, puzzled by how to get rid of the slugs in the garden, sometimes wonder where these mollusks came from. In nature, they live in balance between field and forest communities, from where they move to cultivated plants, often entering the garden along with infected specimens. Also, their appearance is facilitated by warm, humid spring and mild winter weather, stagnant undiluted soil, a large number of fallen leaves at the site where pests can find a convenient place to sleep. Therefore, without proper care, slugs will constantly appear in your country house and you will have to wrestle with your head again and again about how to get rid of them.
What harm do slugs to the garden and their natural enemies
The fight against slugs in the garden often takes a lot of strength and nerves from the gardener due to the excessive activity of the pest. Slugs harm a large number of crops: winter wheat, rye, potato tubers and leaves, color and white cabbage, root crops, lettuce, pea leaves and beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and from garden crops - strawberries and strawberries. The slug harms the parsley, onion, garlic, cucumber leaves, spring wheat, oats, flax and buckwheat.
Slugs gnaw holes in the leaves, not touching only the largest veins and leaf stem; in potato tubers, tomatoes and cucumbers, widened caverns are made inside, in cabbage - indentations in the head, endosperm and germ are gnawed in cereal grains. Therefore, it is not surprising that such a variety of damage makes you wonder how to get rid of slugs in the garden. After themselves, slugs leave traces of mucus and earth, besides pollute the products of the crop, causing them to rot. Slugs often change their location, spreading various diseases among crops: cabbage blotch, potato blight, downy mildew.
How to deal with slugs, learn methods
Slugs are very dangerous in their insatiability and unpredictability, which means that the fight against them immediately after their appearance, is on the agenda for any gardener.
Slugging: The Mechanical Way
Installing traps, perhaps the best remedy for slugs. Between the beds and the paths you can put cabbage leaves soaked in fruit juice or beer, burlap, boards or rags, where they crawl during the day, and you collect them in the evening. You can also prikopat small capacity in the evening so that its rim was level with the ground. There is another kind of trap: it is necessary to bury at the ground level several small containers with soap or saline solution, from which the slugs die, and cover them with sacking. Today, recommendations for the construction of such traps are available to all, without exception, gardeners who are hampered by a slug in the soil, but they do not know how to deal with it.
Did you know? You can purchase special copper self-adhesive tapes or rims, from contact with which the mollusks will receive an electric shock.
Fitometody: what plants scare away slugs
Try to plant in the vicinity of pests plants scaring slugs. The aroma of herbs (laurel, rosemary, cumin, santolina, sage) - is detrimental to pests. Seat them around the perimeter of the beds and you can protect your harvest. Use also phyto-infusions of onion, garlic and mustard to scare away intruders. Do not forget: slugs are insidious and the fight against harmful moluscans can last for a long time, but you need to exert maximum efforts to achieve good results.
Use of drugs
Blue granules "Thunderstorm and Meta" - an effective remedy for slugs in the garden. It copes well with pests, however, a significant disadvantage of using just this type of control is that this chemical composition is very toxic for people and, if inhaled, can cause certain problems (it is often breathed in the process of spilling on the ground in small groups). Therefore, if there is no extreme necessity, it is better to use folk remedies for the garden.Good results are obtained by sprinkling the soil and plants with a 1% solution of ferrous sulfate.
Popular methods: how to fight slugs in their summer cottage with their help
The struggle with slugs in the garden with folk remedies is spraying plants once a week in the evening with a weak solution of citric acid (25 g per 10 l of water) or table 9% vinegar (25 ml). Some gardeners advise to sprinkle the soil around the plants with salt or water the plants with an aqueous 0.1% caffeine solution.
Important! Cornmeal is deadly to moluscans.
Pest prevention
Naturally, you need to know how to deal with slugs in the garden, but this attack is much easier to prevent. As a preventive measure, it is necessary to remove unnecessary stones and boards, weeded weed from the site, as well as periodically mow grass on the paths and dry wet areas. You should also try not to plant the plants too tightly. It will be useful to break off the lower leaves of cabbage and lettuce, as well as regularly loosen the soil.
Important! Particular attention should be paid to the regular loosening of the soil, since the mollusks may be hidden in the cracks of the earth.
After harvesting, plant residues and fallen leaves from under the trees should be removed from the site. However, to preserve a good harvest, gardeners must protect it from various pests and diseases, and in this case also know how to get rid of slugs in the country.
