Bayer organic slug pellets
Mother Hen2
Posts: 41
I'm very much a 'live and let live' gardener but slugs and snails bother me a lot. Nothing worse than planting out my precious plants that I have nurtured for weeks and weeks to have them decimated overnight. I was bought some of the Bayer organic slug pellets which contain ferrous phosphate and apparently the slugs eat these in preference to your plants then the granules swell up inside them killing them. I have been using them liberally around my new sunflower seedlings and every night I put a good quantity around the plants and every night each single granule has disappeared - I have been doing this for a couple of weeks now and I just wonder if anything else eats the granules as I would have thought every slug from miles around would have been dead by now. I have visions of them being snaffled by other wildlife. That said all my sunflowers are still intact!!
Has anyone else had any experience of these?
Posts
Mine have all gone too, but my plants aren't showing signs of slug or snail damage. I have only applied once to protect a newly planted delphinium and my strawberry crop, and won't reapply unless I see signs of attack.
Last edited: 07 June 2017 18:34:31
I would be worried. Wild life is being decimated somewhere.
Organic doesn't mean harmless
In the sticks near Peterborough
The ferrous pellets are kinder than the other chemical based ones. I use them around my hostas, which are about 3 foot away from the pond. I read that the slugs eat the pellets and then they disappear underground to die. In my pond I have a thriving family of frogs and I have had hedgehogs frequently visiting the garden every year since I moved in in 2010. Although I was initially not comfortable of using pellets so close to the wildlife, the evidence speaks for itself that usage of the pellets doesn't appear to have a lot of impact on the wildlife in the pond or the hedgehogs. I've never found a dead frog and come to think of it, have never seen or found a dead slug. Can either mean the frogs and/or hedgehogs are eating the dead slugs, who subsequently don't get harmed by the pellets or the slugs do indeed go underground to die.
Last edited: 07 June 2017 20:08:07
I had to stop using slug pellets (not sure what type) and just accept the holes in my Hosta leaves, as a rat comes in under the fence from the trees at the back and eats them all, I couldn't believe when I saw it but I'd rather have the holes than attract a massive rat! Not sure I agree with Monty on the frogs controling slugs the one's near my pond are the worst hit, in fact the only one without holes is near my front door!
Well, we all know BBC licence funded Monty's garden is unlikely to have your typical common garden frog safeguarding his hostas. Probably has them imported in from the Amazonian rain forest.
That is unsubstantiated nonsense.
Monty's garden has been well established, for many years before the BBC arrived at it.
He gets paid to present the show and gets a contribution towards new projects, many of which, he has said , he would not have in his garden, if it was not for doing the show.
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
At the end of the day, Mother Nature doesn't like a vacuum, so if we upset the balance, then she will send in more of the same plus some more as a safeguard, or send in something else that is far more virulent. In either case we end up in an even worse position then where we started.
It is often helpful to just leave Mother Nature to her own devices, or if you do want a control, then do it lightly, and also encourage other helpful things in. When I started feeding the birds, I noticed the incidence of creepy crawlies such as greenfly and blackfly in my garden reduced a lot, and found from simply sitting watching them one day that once the birds had eaten what was on the table, they started feeding on what was available in the garden. Sorted.