How to Get Rid of Snails & Slugs in Your Garden Naturally

Do you know how to eliminate snails and slugs from gardens? Although adorable and useful to the ecosystem, snails and slugs can be truly fearsome devastators for vegetable gardens and gardens. So let’s see how to eliminate them with natural methods to save our plants from their voracity.

Contents

1 Keeping slugs and snails away with natural methods
2 Good sanitation practices
3 More on this topic

Slugs are a common pest that can wreak havoc in gardens and vegetable patches. These slimy mollusks use their rasping tongues to devour tender young seedlings and leaves, leaving behind telltale slime trails and holes in prized plants.

While chemical pesticides may seem like an easy solution, their toxicity poses risks to pets, beneficial insects, soil health, and human health.

Thankfully, there are many effective natural methods to control slugs without chemicals. In this essay, we will explore various approaches to eliminate slugs from gardens using natural techniques.

Keeping slugs and snails away with natural methods

Here are the best tips and tricks to keep these little mollusks away.

Good sanitation practices

One of the best ways to reduce slug populations without chemicals is through cultural control methods. This involves making the habitat less hospitable to slugs. Eliminate hiding spots by keeping the garden free of debris like boards, rocks, and thick groundcover where slugs like to hide during the day. Keep the vegetation trimmed around the outer edges of planting beds to remove the cool, damp places slugs seek out.

Promptly remove faded plants and fallen fruits and vegetables that can harbor slug eggs and provide food for the pests.

Overall, good sanitation practices make the environment less attractive to slugs.

How to Get Rid of Snails and Slugs in Your Garden With Natural Methods — There are several natural systems to keep these little mollusks away!

Beer traps

There are also several effective natural remedies that can be used to trap and kill slugs. One popular method is beer traps – shallow containers sunk into the soil and filled with beer, which attracts slugs to drown. For a more humane approach, you can also use boards or grapefruit halves as refuges for slugs to congregate under during the day, then collect and relocate them to a non-garden area.

Crushed eggshells

Crushed eggshells sprinkled around plants abrade and deter slugs. Just take som eggshells, break them into small pieces and sprinkle them on the soil.

The sharp shells will annoy the snails during their crawling movement. For this same reason, spreading sharp gravel around sensitive plants can deter slugs from approaching. The difference between these two approaches is that with eggshells you will also provide the right nourishment to the soil, which will absorb all the calcium.

The operation is tiring and quite complex, also because it will have to be repeated after every rain, but it is perfect for those who want to learn how to eliminate snails from the garden in a definitive and completely natural way.

Use natural repellents

In addition to knowing what snails like to eat, it will also be very useful to use everything they ‘don’t like’ and exploit certain substances to discourage them from settling in the garden.

Snails, in fact, stay away from sand, salt, sawdust, ash and coffee grounds as these substances tend to dehydrate their body which is made up of 90% water. In this sense, it will be very useful to place barriers made of these substances at the entrances to our garden, for example by adding coarsely chopped egg or walnut shells.

Diatomaceous earth, a powdery natural substance made of fossilized algae, can be dusted around plants to shred slugs’ bodies. Garlic oil also have natural repellent properties. Used diligently, these remedies can thin out slug populations.

How to Get Rid of Snails & Slugs in Your Garden With Natural Methods — Snails, although adorable, must be eliminated from our plants

Create a fence with copper

Another material that snails deeply hate is copper.

Copper emits unpleasant “signals”, comparable to a small shock from low voltage electricity, on contact with the mucus produced by the snail itself. Here’s how to proceed: arrange some wires around your plants or crops (you can find it available in special bundles in all Garden Centers) and complete the work with sandpaper disks that you can cut out and place at the base of each plant or on the stem to protect it in a vegetation is even more effective against ravenous invasion.

Aromatic plants

An excellent natural remedy to keep snails and slugs away is to grow plants capable of creating a sort of barrier.

In fact, there are perfumes produced by some plants that are literally hated by snails. The most hated are aromatic plants such as basil.

By preparing macerates based on one of these aromatics and abundantly spraying the soil and green parts before going to sleep, you will keep snails away but you will also get rid of aphids and ants in one fell swoop.

If you opt for chilli macerate, remember to dissolve two chillies in a liter of water, blend, leave to rest for 12 hours and then filter. This infusion should not be used on the stems of tomatoes and cucumbers but only on the surrounding soil.

Resort to predators

Even snails have their enemies: frogs, toads, turtles and robins, to name a few. Encourage their presence in your garden and let nature take its course.