@newbie77 - yes, that is my experience too. Nothing I'm doing is making a dent even within one week, let alone a season. 1000 slugs a month is a lot to take off a 4x7m plot, and this isn't a bad year. I'm fairly sure my 'wildlife gardening" efforts have made the slug situation a lot worse, but better for lots of other wildlife.
Oh yes. But my position is that, from the beginning nine years ago, I have angled towards setting up 'wildlife gardens' front and back (yes, I do appreciate the irony). So there is deep mulching, leaf litter, wood piles, lots of intentional nooks and crannies, rotting branches and damp spots under hedges even in very dry weather. The frogs and toads love it.
Hmm, sorry I don't have anything of value to input, but I find this quite curious and it seems like such a huge amount of slugs, 130 a week. Everything I pick up in the garden has a slug or snail stuck on it but I only ever see them out and about in certain conditions, warmish and damp to wet, never in the dry.
Hmm, sorry I don't have anything of value to input, but I find this quite curious and it seems like such a huge amount of slugs, 130 a week.
The actual active population is very much higher than that as I am getting 30-50 a night on a cursory hunt. It doesn't involve picking up pots or looking under leaves - those are just the large ones visible on the paths, concrete, decking, patio, fences etc. I go about usually about 11pm. I go up the garden with a torch along the east side and down the west side methodically and usually, but the time I am walking back south (7m) there are another ten that have come out in the last five mins. Sometimes I go back out to do a later check (out of interest) and find the same amount again. I'm sure that if I checked under bushes, plant pots, under bags of compost etc I could find more dozens. But all this hurts my back as it is, and it doesn't seem to make any difference, so there seems little point.
In a bad year like 2018, the ground was slithering. I was getting about 30 per square metre - all over the concrete, the door step - a seething mass in the flower beds. And that's not to include all the snails.
I should say that it's a well drained garden - no soggier, boggy bits or standing water (other than a micropond).
The only thing I have found that actually works is pellets and you need to use them from March even if you don't see any slugs, if you hit them hard enough before June you'll be fine the rest of the year, I'm sure you could use traps or hand picking to hit them hard but I don't find it as effective, I can collect 5lts in around 20 minutes and it doesn't seem to do much if I havn't kept them down early on in the year. Trying to get rid of them at this time of year is pretty much a waste of time.
The jury seems to be out on whether slug pellets don't harm other wildlife like worms - even the pellets labelled 'organic'. Pellets also seem to work best in dry weather, ealse they dissolve.
It would be worth a test, I guess, to carpet both gardens in pellets in March and see if it makes a dent. I see slugs mating now, copulation can take up to three hours.
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Fire............I have used these successfully on my plot without the lids sunk about 3 inches in the soil.
I got about 5 a day but when I tried to remove one of the traps it jammed so I pulled harder and chucked it all over me.
Stupidity is a wonderful thing to watch !!
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-slugs-snails-destructors-crops-gardens.html