Help! How can I deal with pests like slugs and snails?

Very exciting here on the flower farm.

We’ve had a new baby blue-tongue lizard take up permanent residence. I’ve seen him a few times now, over a period of a few weeks, so I’m feeling pretty confident that he is here to stay. Like all blueys, he’s a bit shy, but didn’t seem to mind me this morning when I was trying to capture him on video.

We have other blue-tongues elsewhere in our yard, so I feel pretty honored to have another bluey take up residency. Of the 300 skink species native to Australia, blue-tongues are the largest, and can live for up to 20 years. Hope this little fella hangs around that long. At the moment he is only about 15cm, but they can get up to 60cm as fully grown adults.

Blueys eat snails, slugs, caterpillars and greens such as dandelions. Unfortunately, if they consume snails or slugs that have eaten snail bait - even the so-called ‘safe’ snail bait - or greens that have been treated with herbicide, they will be poisoned and die.

We don’t use any chemicals on the farm or in the house. But I hear you. It is challenging to see a row of new seedling get mowed down overnight by slugs. Luckily, there are lots of things you can do to minimise damage to your carefully nurtured seedlings whilst not causing any knock-on damage to helpful creatures.

We use a combination of treatments for snails and slugs. Our first line of defence is conducting night raids - getting out after dark with a head torch and picking slugs and snails from plants and soil. I put them into a container of water with a secure lid (or they just all crawl away) and feed them to the chooks the next morning.

Beers traps are great too - submerge a shallow container up to its rim into the garden bed and fill with beer. Snails and slugs will be attracted to it and die a happy soporific death. Again, these go to the chooks the next morning. You will need to empty and refill the containers frequently, especially if there has been rain.

We also use copper big time throughout the garden. Snails and slugs react to copper as if they have received a slight electric shock, and won’t pass over it. Old electrical cables can be stripped back to the copper wire and wrapped around the legs of your seedling tables. Copper pipe and be used around rows of lettuces and other particularly soft seedlings, And we use lots of homemade ‘copper sleeves’. These are PVC pipes that have been cut into 5-10 cm rings and had copper tape applied to the outside. After lots of trial and error, I think it is best to apply the tape to one end of the ring, allowing the none-copper covered end of the ring to be pushed deeply into the soil. This leaves just the copper tape exposed. It is imperative to ensure you don’t create any ‘bridge or tunnel’ situations - that is, allow space under the ring for snails and slugs to crawl through, or bridge over the top of the ring with mulch, twigs etc. We use these rings on things like lettuce seedlings, any seeds planted directly and even baby dahlias, and remove the rings once the seedlings are well established (but before they get so big you can’t remove the ring). I’ve been using this system for years, and each ring gets used over and over indefinitely.

It is also imperative that you create some enticing habitat for useful wildlife. Leaving a bit of your yard wild with long grass, leaving out dishes of fresh water under protective shrubs, using chunky woody mulch and creating hiding places by having rock piles or small sections of pipes will all help to make your yard an attractive place for skinks and blueys to visit and hopefully stay.

All of this is slightly more work than flinging around handfuls of snail bait, but for me the benefit of seeing frogs, blue tongue lizards and other skinks flourish in my flower farm is more than worth it.

We’re almost into our fourth year of growing here, and the snail and slug pressure has significantly decreased. It is not a coincidence that there has been a simultaneous increase in the skink population . When we started we were working with a yard that had been superphosphated and treated with all manner of chemicals for pests and problems - everything from ant poison, to snail baits, and bindy spray to roundup - seriously, how is this stuff still for sale? As anyone who is tuned in to organic farming knows, when you change from chemical farming back to traditional, organic or natural farming, it does get worse before it gets better. At first, we had wall to wall slugs and snails, but now they’re more background noise than booming rock concert. This could be a coincidence, but I choose to believe its blue tongue factor.

How do you treat slugs and snails? I’d love to hear your tips.