I’ve been really frustrated lately with my string beans looking like this:
I was talking to my neighbor, and she said that she thought it was from slugs. She was using banana peels around her garden to ward them away. I remembered that my mother used to use beer to capture the slugs. So I went searching on the web for solutions.
I talked to a local composting expert who said you can fish them out and throw them in your compost. Ewww!!!! Luckily, we have 7 year-olds. Nothing disgusts them! So my daughter has been happily fishing them out and putting them in our compost bin. I gave her strict instructions that I do NOT want to see them!
I have found that the cups I’m using are a little small and other things tend to get into them, I’m going to switch to yogurt containers as they become available.
- Sprinkle coffee grounds around the plants to ward off the slugs and other critters – This seems to be the most effective and the thing I’m sticking with!
- Sprinkle oatmeal around. The slugs eat the oatmeal and die. Then birds come along and eat them. I’ve been trying this and haven’t seen any dead slugs, but I *do* have a lot of birds around! You need to re-sprinkle the oatmeal after the rain.
Happy Greening!
Alicia
Other Natural GLC posts:
Getting the Ants Out – Naturally!
Getting Rid of Fruit Flies Naturally
You can also go out at night with scissors and snip them…. Gross but highly effective.
Another suggestion I’ve been reading about is to crush up pistachio shells and put them around the plants. Our kids have been eating a lot of pistachios recently, so I was pleased to hear about this suggestion.
My mom told me about the beer idea, I hadn’t heard of the others. We’ve had some major slug issues this year so I’m definitely going to try some of these. A word of caution about the coffee grounds, from what I’ve read previously about them they can make the soil a little too acidic for some plants, other plants love that so I guess take that into consideration when using that method. I pinned this post, thanks for sharing!
I didn’t know the oatmeal trick. I’ll have to try that if we get any this summer. Thanks for linking up to Tuesday Greens!