slugs,snails

[Johnboy]

Hi Galatea,
I'm afraid that I look upon you first paragraph as pure fiction.
Wildlife to not hoover up the pellets. The pellets are more resilient to rain than you are suggesting and there is nothing in an organic slug pellet to harm a pet or any wild life should they manage to eat some.
Try treating a 5 acre plot with Nematodes and the net cost would be that it would be cheaper to pack up growing and go to the local town and buy all your produce.
JB.

[alan refail]

Hi Galatea

I agree with Johnboy that birds don't "hoover up" dead slugs. In the days before I gave up using metaldehyde-based pellets I never saw any evidence of dead slugs being eaten. However, I certainly wouldn't use them now. Keeping ducks, I have very little problem with slugs outside. In the polytunnel I keep snails down by very occasionally using a few "Advanced Slug Pellets". These are very different from the old ones - read the details here:
http://www.monrobrands.com/growingsucce ... cordset1=0

Re ground beetles: if you have any their numbers will be reduced when they fall into beer traps and drown.

[Nature's Babe]

Alan is right, ducks love slugs and the best predators are indian runners, just before fruiting I let them loose in my strawberry beds, they had a feast, flattened the plants a little but they soon sprang up again, and the crop has been relatively pest free, Another tip slogs and snails like shade, plastic boards, damp wood planks, damp / wet cardboard, lay some where you suspect they are lurking, in the daytime check underneath your trap, hey presto they will have collected underneath and be easy pickings for you.
Also when crops are harvested and the bed empty, let your chickens loose on the plot, they will scratch out any pests and eggs in the soil.

[Galatea]

Hi Galatea,
Wildlife do not hoover up the pellets. The pellets are more resilient to rain than you are suggesting and there is nothing in an organic slug pellet to harm a pet or any wild life should they manage to eat some.
Try treating a 5 acre plot with Nematodes and the net cost would be that it would be cheaper to pack up growing and go to the local town and buy all your produce.
JB.

Hi Johnboy,

Funilly enough I actually do garden a 5 acre plot, and have found Ferramol's Ferric Phosphate "Organic" pellets to be of little more than very short-term use and then only on specific plants. Although they are long-lasting when used under cover in tunnels, the greenhouse etc., outdoors I've found their weather resistance to be poor - generally about a week at the very most in wet weather (which is actually consistent with their own product description which states: " If it remains damp then replacement pellets may be required 7 days later") - which doesn't economically or practically compare very well with a season-long barrier.

If I was to treat the entire garden with pellets through a wet period like last summer then I would be using industrial quantities of Ferrous Phosphate, on a weekly basis which I'm not prepared to do. I personally find the barrier approach to be more practical, cheaper, and much more durable as a first line of defence. That's just my experience in my garden of course, and yours no doubt may be different.

I did not suggest that wildlife "hoover up the pellets" but rather that they might, and indeed do, eat the dead and dying snails in particular - as I have witnessed Thrushes doing, for instance, and here's a quote from a thread on a recent wildlife forum:

"I have just contacted the Hedgehog Preservation Society as I made rather a disturbing discovery. I found that one of our visiting hedgehogs had been eating slug pellets. In fact it had eaten so many, that the little poos were totally turqoise and crumbly."

If you look at the regulatory testing data then you'll find that almost all of the normal pesticide testing requirements for Ferrous Phosphate slug pellets were waived based on the ubiquity of Iron in the environment, even though quite small quantities of Iron can cause acute toxicity, liver failure and indeed death in humans and other mammals.

To quote a Cornell University study:
"The lethal dose of iron for a 2 year old child is 3 g, and just 1 g leads to severe poisoning over a period of a few hours."

Ferrous Phosphate is used as a human Iron supplement specifically because it does break down into iron relatively quickly when digested.

No studies have even been carried out on the long-term effects of ingestion of Ferrous Phosphate by birds or any other wildlife (aside from worms) for that matter. The study using earthworms, incidentally, concluded that neither Metaldehyde or Iron Phosphate affected
earthworm feeding, growth or mortality.

Of course, environmentally speaking, Ferrous Phosphate is a massive improvement on Metaldehyde based pellets, and is indeed based on a naturally occurring substance (hence it's "Organic" status) but to my mind there is no one size fits all approach to this, or many other aspects of gardening. Pellets will work well for some gardeners, barriers for some, traps and nematodes for others. I was simply trying to suggest that there are lots of different options to consider and I find it quite surprising that you are so resistant to that idea.

[Galatea]

Re ground beetles: If you have any their numbers will be reduced when they fall into beer traps and drown.

Hi Alan,

We don't have the benefits of ducks to do our slug work here unfortunately, but we are lucky enough to have a huge diversity of invertebrates in our garden, including lots of ground beetles, and I don't recall finding any in our traps. Beer (and cider!) traps do attract slugs extremely well - it's been postulated that they can detect the smell from a fair way away - and they are much more interested in investigating that than they are in investigating the plants. The beetles aren't attracted to the beer/cider and evidently not to the drowning slugs either, at least not in my experience.

[PLUMPUDDING]

I'm going to put some bran out in one or two places to see if that works. When I've tried it before it certainly attracts lots of slugs, so even if it doesn't kill them you can either gather them up and dispose of them, or they may be too full of bran to eat your plants.

I read somewhere that it disrupts their digestion and they die, but can't find any scientific confirmation of this.

I think I'll water the soil before I put it down as it is rather dry just now. There's a lot less slug damage, but they are still getting inside the lettuces and having a nibble at some newly planted things.

[Galatea]

I'm going to put some bran out in one or two places to see if that works.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about Bran as a mollusc killer just recently - apparently it came out tops in a Gardeners World trial a couple of years ago.

It seems it definitely attracts them like moths to a flame & it's meant to disrupt/halt their digestion process, much like the metal (Iron, Aluminium & Copper) based pellets. Apparently you can get it most cheaply from suppliers of Horse feedstuffs.

[alan refail]

Hi Galatea

I always forget that most people, strangely , don't have ducks.

I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate your experiences of slug control over five acres comparing the merits of pellets, beer traps and barriers.