Peter Cundall: How to get rid of slugs and snails
WHEN temperatures begin to fall and autumn rains keep the soil moist, a deadly group of cool weather pests emerge.
Most operate at night while we’re asleep and hide during the day.
They are slugs and snails and, if not controlled early, can devastate plants by eating leaves and soiling edible crops with their black droppings.
The big giveaway with a snail infestation is the glistening trails they leave behind. The good news is, those can also act as guides to hiding places.
Alongside their winter companion pests — especially slugs — snails have a special taste for the leaves of cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas.
Just one hungry snail can easily consume a row of young lettuce seedlings overnight. Slugs have a special taste for Asian leaf vegetables.
As the weather cools, these pests multiply rapidly, thriving in the typical cold-moist conditions of autumn and winter.
We can obtain reasonable control by using snail and slug pellets, but there are always dangers of crawling children or pets eating them.
As usual, and like most other gardeners, I’ve been carrying out a series of experiments to try to control these pests safely.
When I learned the great killer of snails and slugs is coffee, I tried spreading exhausted grounds closely around the bases of vulnerable plants.
This method successfully kept these slimy pests at bay, but I was unable to use both liquid coffee dregs and grounds in my watering can.
Unfortunately, this combination tends to accumulate inside the sprinkler, blocking the tiny holes.
We had several, half-used containers of instant coffee sitting on a shelf, left behind by some of our sons and their friends.
I could never drink the horrible stuff, so I thought I’d put it to some use to control a developing snail and slug problem in our vegetable patch.
I emptied about 100g of instant coffee into a 10-litre bucket and poured in a couple of litres of hot water — enough to dissolve the granules.
This was topped up with enough cold water to almost fill the bucket.
This was enough to fill my watering can with slightly weak coffee and, to enable better penetration, I added a dessert spoon of washing detergent.
Some of this aromatic mixture was poured over several maturing old cabbages which were becoming seriously infested with small black slugs.
I allowed the liquid to soak in deeply between the larger leaves, down to where most of the slugs were hiding.
I also sprinkled it over numerous smaller, younger brassicas and lettuces and silverbeet.
The following day I dragged one of the older cabbages from the ground and sliced off the roots and base, also pulling off all old, well-chewed leaves.
Inside was an unpleasant mess of sticky, black droppings among which were dozens of dead and dying slugs.
I’m about to give my broccoli and cauliflower plants the same treatment, but where curds are already starting to form, I’ll concentrate only on the outer leaves.
I’m also starting to examine the undersides of those brassica plants that may have suffered a check to growth during the recent dry period.
When these plants become stressed or are left in the ground too long after maturity, they often become infested with grey aphids.
Sometimes the entire undersides of large leaves can be covered with thousands of these small sap-suckers.
My treatment is simple. If big, outer leaves are infested they are snapped off and buried in the nearest compost heap.
Smaller colonies of grey aphids are dealt with by a good spraying with pyrethrum.
This is a safe spray for us, but an instant contact killer of most insect pests, especially aphids.
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