Slugs. Nothing quite destroys plants like slugs can. They are so indiscriminately destructive to plants and advance like an army out of nowhere, it's easy to reach for the big guns and pellet the garden.
However, while I do drop the odd pellet strategically on non-edible areas, I do it only sparsely and I'm not sure it even works. The real battle for me is not fought with pellets. It's fought with scissors.
Now let me make one thing clear - it's a disgusting job. And not one done for personal enjoyment, nor is it for everyone, but the thing about slugs is, they've got to be killed somehow. You can't relocate them, you can't donate them to the local shelter, and you can't leave them be - unless you don't want any vegetables. It comes down to a grim choice of, well, how exactly do you want to kill them.
I don't find salt humane in any way - I've watched slugs in salt and it doesn't look pleasant. Drowning doesn't seem so great either, they spend a lot of time trying to escape and honestly, they often manage to, which defeats the purpose somewhat. Beer traps even less so - slugs can climb up almost anything, I tried the beer trap and one slug fell in which could have been considered a success but for the fact I went out one night and saw quite some number using it as a free bar. If you aren't looking at your beer traps at midnight then you aren't seeing how well they're "working"!
Out of all the options, for me, snipping them in two seems the least offensive way of dispatching of them, although it does initially seem quite disgusting. This way also they can stay in the food chain - they're not poisoned or salty and they're available to eat by any birds or animals that wish to.
So - I tend to arm myself with three things - some tongs to remove the slugs from plants so they don't make a disgusting mess, a torch, and scissors or shears if you don't want to get up close.
Initially I did feel quite disgusted with myself for the indiscriminate massacre of what must have been hundreds of slugs in a single night, but, you get used to it. Or perhaps just hardened to it. At the end of the day it's a matter of veg or no veg, they would happily destroy your entire crop - in fact it's not even a would, they will and do. So - as a gardener we have to sometimes do gross things and we have to kill a lot of creatures one way or another.
The important thing for me is that I do it manually and don't resort to pellets or worse. I don't believe in killing anything that doesn't need to be killed, and I don't believe in chemical solutions unless they're the only option.
Have I won though? No. Not yet. The battle against slugs is a combination of hiding things from them (raising plants up, creating barriers, etc) and removing them. Attracting frogs with a pond hasn't worked out so well - I have the pond but no frogs yet.
I'm still thinking about nematodes but I don't know, I might try, I might not. I don't really like the idea, although I can't justify why. I'm most certainly not averse to biological controls - in fact I use them regularly with amblyseieus which I have written about. We'll see I guess.
I guess later I'll talk about how many aphids I've squished. It's not really aphid season yet though.
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