Its War

We love to grow our own vegetables here in our little patch of paradise.  We always get plenty of veg from the garden in Summer but really struggle to get Winter veg established.  The main challenge is slugs which appear out of nowhere as soon as we start putting the Winter seedlings in.  Usually, we manage to save most of the veg seedlings by picking the slugs off the worst affected plants.  This year the slugs have either been much hungrier than previous years or there have been more of them.  We persisted with picking them off until they crossed the line.   When they ate all of the pea seedlings (my favourite!!) to the ground, the slugs threw down the gauntlet and declared war.  Challenge accepted!

In our battle against the slugs, we didn't want to use any nasties like pellets to control them.  We decided on a three-prong approach; picking the slugs, slug traps and copper tape. My lovely Mum told us, one time when we were helping weed in her garden, that beer traps work really well on slugs.  We don't drink beer. We prefer wine and there's no way I'd be wasting that on slugs, even if it did work.  But it is the yeast in the beer that the slugs are partial to, so we substituted Vegemite dissolved in water and kept our fingers crossed.  

We'd read that when slugs crawl across copper tape, they get a little zap.  It doesn't kill them, but it keeps them away from the plants.  Clearly lots of other gardeners know this about copper tape because sourcing some was easier said than done.  We managed to get the last two rolls at the third hardware store we visited.  Then we spent a good hour putting copper tape around our four raised garden beds and lots of plastic pots that we'd cut the bottoms out of so we could use them as collars to protect the seedlings in the ground.  No sooner had we finished than a slug, as bold as brass, slithered right across the tape.  What the?  We did a bit more research and learned that the tape only works when it's wet. Phew. Not a complete waste of our time then.   

We checked the Vegemite traps the following day to find them full of floating slugs, which hopefully died happy (I really don't like killing things even when they are eating all my plants).  It took a little longer to see if the copper tape worked.  I planted some new pea seedlings, with trepidation, and put one of the copper ringed pots around each plant.  Within a week the plants were peeking over the top of the pots and there wasn't a single bite out of a leaf to be seen anywhere. 

We also saw a dramatic improvement in the seedlings we'd previously planted in the ground and in the garden beds:

They've still a way to go (uh oh, we're just over halfway through Winter already) but we hope to pick peas, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts which we planted for the first time this year.   If all goes well I'll have some photos of our bounty to post on a future blog.