If you have a lot of slugs, you’ll have a lot more slugs if you don’t do anything about it!
It was happy hour and I put in a pretty good day! I enjoyed a cold beer in the sunshine and got to thinking… I don’t want to jinx myself by saying this out loud but “I haven’t seen a single slug in the last few weeks”. Earlier this spring I lifted a board in the garden and found a big old kinda dead looking slug along side a cluster of slug eggs – I found two clusters which I quickly ended! Since then, nothing…it might be a wee bit early to start seeing them on the regular. I’m just in the midst of serving up the biggest smorgasbord of the year – new dahlia greens… so I’m very interested to see how things progress in terms of slug pressure this year.
Last year we endured inconceivable slug pressure early in the season when the dahlias are just trying to get their feet under them and I’m pretty sure it was my fault. I spent hours and hours hand picking slugs off the precious dahlias… mostly tiny skin coloured baby slugs smaller than the size of a dime…some smaller, some bigger. For about 4 weeks, I was out in the patch every morning and night for a total of about 4 hours per day hunting slugs.
What to look for: If you find leaves with holes in them or chewed edges, you’ll likely find slugs as the culprit early in the season (May/June). When the plants are small with only a few sets of leaves, they are most vulnerable. Once the dahlias get ahead of the slugs, slug damage is less of a problem. Heavy slug damage can make a dahlia plant look stunted, with curled leaves that have been damaged by the slimy little pests.
When to find slugs on your plants: very early morning and late evening or the middle of the night with a headlamp!
The tiny slugs seem to cause the most damage because they are harder to spot and when you think you’ve got them all, you probably have not! They hide under the leaves, and even tuck themselves into spaces where the stalk of the dahlia emerges from the soil. I had thousands of these slugs… it wasn’t uncommon to find 10 of these little buggers on one plant in one morning and find 10 more the next morning! Where were they coming from and what did I need to do differently?!!!
I realized I had some bad habits that needed to change: piles of pulled weeds in every row left for extended periods, pots full of pulled weeds left for extended periods, and possibly “strategic” tarps left down over the winter.
For the past year, I have been dedicated and disciplined about not leaving piles of pulled weeds in the beds or on my pathways – no more leaving pots full of decomposing weeds in the garden and I didn’t leave any tarps down over the winter. I went thru all the effort to do the weeding, but because I didn’t “finish the job” by immediately moving that stuff to the compost, I created more work for myself that would turn out to be extremely time consuming – dealing with slugs and lots of them! They love things like big pots and wood and piles of decomposing plant matter to hide under for shelter during the day. All are intimate hideaway havens for slugs to meet up and make egg clusters – how many eggs in a cluster? LOTS!
So far… it seems that easy… remove all those things that make inviting slug habitat and you will have way less slug activity in your patch! I’m expecting that a few slugs will show up for the party soon, but I’m hopeful there won’t be the thousands and thousands experienced last season. Fingers crossed! I’m ready for them with my bucket of salt water and good clean garden habits! …
