A different approach to slugs - overfeed them!

I'm just watcvhing the Seppp Holzer documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDDMarbsbT4&NR=1 and following his method for rabbit pests - he feeds tham lots of plants to divert them from the main crops - would it work to plant LOTS of salad around my crops this year so they eat them before getting to my own lettuce crops'? Anyone tried that?

Rather overfeed them on beer! 

How to make a beer trap.... in pictures

Chelle

Plant a tasty slug garden near your own veggies and periodically run ducks through it?

      The, more you have the moore likely you are to adquire things that eat them, black birds do, do small mammals mice and such or foxes and hedgehogs eat them, i don't know? What about corvidos magpies and things i believe in this type of birds for getting rid of tent worms, change attitudes tro corvidos and you will have less big insects. agri rose macaskie.

Kerrick wrote:
Plant a tasty slug garden near your own veggies and periodically run ducks through it?

I have to agree with Kerrick on this one - Go Ducks!

Heh, my wife will kill me if she sees this, but create snake habitat: a big pile of rocks in a sunny spot.

We have lots of garter snakes in the garden (harmless, I know, and my wife knows it too, but they still freak her out), and they take care of the slug problem for us.

First check to see that the snakes that are abundant in your area are ones that actually eat slugs.

Kerrick wrote:
First check to see that the snakes that are abundant in your area are ones that actually eat slugs.

Good point 

Kerrick. I have a garden not a small holding and don't know anyone with ducks.

I did find a toad under my shed last year. How can I encourage him to stay around?

And our environment doesn't have slug eating snakes!

Toad habitat! That's a good alternative. Toads like things to hide under and rocks to sun on, and some bare soil that's sheltered from the rain to burrow in. You could certainly do worse than make some toad shelters around the garden. I've seen toads making holes under overturned flowerpot saucers that happened to be left propped up at one side.

There's no possibility of ducks? What a shame--a lot of people near me are keeping a few ducks in small backyards. My permaculture teacher keeps a bathtub of rainwater and filtered greywater for them to paddle in and herds them around his garden on slug patrol. (A friend of his learned her greywater filtration system wasn't effective enough when her ducks started sinking--if you don't get all the detergent out of the water, the ducks don't float, which puts them in quite a predicament.)

escargot

now i am not vegetarian i agree wit brenda groth escargot. whse go ta recipe. I think you have to keep them in water and bran till they loose their slim and them boil them and then butter and garlic and parley sauce. na dend of snails. i can try to look it up, spanish recipeies at anyrate. maybe you can feed them to chickens if you break the shells, a bit grizzly, you would have to spend such a lot of time killing snails. agri  rose macaskie.

      As there is a job shortage keeping geese for other people  to hire, if they want something to clean up on their snails, could be a way of earning a penny or two.
     So can keeping long tailed jays, birds that are pinkish with blue tails. They do it in China trained ones to take to places with tent worms so they can gobble up the tent worms. Tent worms can give people allergies so getting rid of them in built up places full of pines, ecologically, maybe well paid. Rose macaskie.

  keithBC
    you talk about snakes and your wife not liking them.  very cool writer on woods quite a botanist who also has books on plants in africa who however did not go to university or study it there,unfortunatley a Spainish writer, Jesus Charco, is said to have persuaded his father, a farmer from La Mancha like Don Quxote, the center of Spain, one may suppose to be a fairley reactionary type of person  to leave snakes alone. His friend who wrote the preface to his book said he sat down to quarrel it through with his father regularly till he managed it.

   

Kerrick wrote:
First check to see that the snakes that are abundant in your area are ones that actually eat slugs.

If they don't eat slugs, they must have some other beneficial role in the ecosystem. I would encourage snakes unless they are poisonous.