@Fire Those pictures look like my place on a damp summers night, masses of spanish slugs. I also have leopard slugs, keeled slugs, cheese snails, trapdoor snails, banded snails, roman snails, but in tiny numbers. We have lizards, adders, hedgehogs, frogs and toads.
Natural balance seems to work for some things, aphids for example, I don't get overwhelmed by aphids even on broad beans or roses. there's plenty of things to eat them and keep their numbers down, but nothing eats a spanish slug (other than as people have said other Spanish slugs)
Slugs don't leave anything edible behind, not of plants they like, entire full grown iceberg lettuces can and have vanished overnight, they crawl up peas and eat the pods then abseil back down on strings of mucus, and don't even ask what they do to strawberries. I am yet to find a single vegetable they don't like. they are as happy munching on the leaves of onions as they are on carrot roots, squash flowers and celery stalks.
I am firmly of the belief that we make our own slug problems, at least in part. The part of my land that is farmed and grows a conventional crop of Barley/rye/oats has very few slugs, the vegetable area has thousands, and the wild areas are somewhere inbetween. So if I only grew grass I wouldn't need to kill slugs, but I also wouldn't make any money.
I've just been out and pelleted for the second time this year, doing it now is much more effective than trying to catch up later. As for dosage, well that varies a lot I have professional pellets with want 60 pellets or 0.7g per m2 (7kg per hectare) and some standard British pellets that say 5g per m2 Even given that the former contain 3x the active ingredient of the latter that is still a lower dose.
There must be something in there they like, but I have noticed later in the season it can't compete with ripe strawberries or lettuce or something else they really like.
I pellet over the entire area to start with but then later in the season I find I only need to do the edges, where "new" slugs come in from the surrounding wild areas. So long as I intercept them while they come over the grass or gravel they go for the pellets, slugs already in the strawberry beds much prefer strawberries to pellets, and who can blame them!
It sounds an interesting experiment, take some nice new lettuce plants, transplant them, surround some with pellets and then place pellets away from the others. see which ones survive best.
A slug frenzy tonight over .... daffodils. Not far from two beer traps. Which were totally empty of slugs. I counted 42 assorted slugs in that spot. It really feels that all the efforts haven't made a dent. Perennials like foxgloves and phlox, much as I love them, really don't stand a chance.
@Fire - In my last garden which was blessed with plentiful Belgian rainfall I would go out at night with a torch and collect slugs by the hundreds crawling all over the daffodils in the big front bed. The locals thought I was potty but it was the only way to keep the numbers down.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
As the beer traps aren't attracting them ( they all look to be the same species -- I wonder if some are less attracted to beer than others?) I too feel the only way is to collect them. After all, every one you dispatch is one less that will breed. I've never seen so many in such a small area. But in a wet spring the daffodils and other bulbs in grass here are felled by slugs, but spread over too great an area to deal with.
It really does help to collect them, but I don't envy you the task of snipping all those.......I would put some dead ones on paving to attract others away from plants, then collect those too.
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I've never seen so many in such a small area. But in a wet spring the daffodils and other bulbs in grass here are felled by slugs, but spread over too great an area to deal with.
It really does help to collect them, but I don't envy you the task of snipping all those.......I would put some dead ones on paving to attract others away from plants, then collect those too.