Marcus Lewitzki

Patrick Whitefield wrote:Hello,

Yes, slugs and mulch is one of the perennial questions. Permaculture started in Australia, where slugs aren't such a problem but drying soil and soil exposed to excessive sun are big problems. Here in temperate climates conditions are different and slugs are a much bigger problem. I feel that importing Australian permaculture wholesale rather misses the point. For me the basis of permaculture is tuning into the unique characteristics of the land and the people in question and designing for them, not faithfully following a prescription. Myself I use very little mulch. Mostly I just mulch with well made compost.

Here I'm following Charles Dowding, a famous no-dig gardener here in Britain. He started off his gardening career some 25 years ago very much inspired by Ruth Stout and her deep mulch method. He very soon found you can't get away with that in a place where slugs are a problem and adopted a compost-only approach to mulching. He mulches the whole of his garden with 5cm (2in) of compost every autumn. By spring it's well incorporated into the soil and he has a slug-free habitat for his vulnerable little plants. Putting compost on in autumn is against all the theory, which says the nutrients in it will be leached out by the rain come spring. But he reckons his soil is so full of life that they all become bound up in biological form and there's no significant leaching.

Probably the best way to control slugs in the garden is with ducks. Let them have free range in winter, when there are no crops they want to eat, and by spring there will be no slug eggs left at all. The only slugs you'll have will be ones which come in from outside. You can then let the ducks into the garden when you're there and if they stop eating slugs and start eating your crops you can politely usher them back into their permanent home. You may have to net some of their favourite nibbles, eg young brassicas. You need to get the right breed. Most ducks are vegetarian but Khaki Campbells are omniverous and love slugs.

Frogs are the next best. They won't eliminate slugs, as no wild predator eliminates its prey, but a good population of frogs makes a big difference. All you need is to provide a pond with shallow water, less than 60cm (2ft), and they'll come in if you live in a rural area. It can dry up after the frog breeding season is over. In suburban and urban areas it's hard to build up a frog population, though, as cats will kill them.

Personally, I can't keep ducks as I'm often away from home, nor frogs because of the local cat population. I try to minimise slug problems by growing crops which avoid them, including perennial vegetables and spring greens (collards) which, in our mild climate you can start off in autumn, when slugs aren't a problem, and mature them in spring. When I do have some vulnerable crops I sprinkle a cordon of bran around them. Slugs simply love bran - they'll go for it in preference to green vegetables - but it's fatal to them. It dries up their slime and they swell up and die. I just use it to get the plants over the first few vulnerable days when I plant them out. I don't like to use too much of it. After all it's food and you could use up more calories of bran than the calories in vegetables you save, which seems to me to miss the point rather.

Has anyone else got good tips?

Great tips Patrick! I'm a newbie at gardening and have basically seen every film with Geoff Lawton to get into Permaculture techniques. This year was the first year where I actually had a garden that I could try some of the things I have seen and read about throughout the years and the first simple thing I wanted to try was "sheet mulching" or "lasagna mulching". The only problem is that I live in Sweden and we have a lot of slugs (which I hadn't thought about) so two days ago I realized I had a huge infestation of slugs in my grow bed. So I went on the internet to try and find something to deal with the problem quickly and basically read about every technique from ducks, frogs and snakes to copper and salt etc. I did however find a new one that I hadn't seen anywhere - coffee. Apparently it's a neurotoxin to slugs and a quick fix, so I bought a pack of the cheapest, ground-up coffee (as I am probably the only swede who doesn't drink coffee and thus don't have it at home).

In the evening as the sun started to settle and the slugs came up to feed on my plants I picked everyone I could find, placed them in a plastic container and then sprinkled the coffee all around the grow bed and around every plant (corn, squash, beans and lettuce). And just to see if it actually works on the slugs I sprinkled it into the plastic container as well. 5 minutes later all the prisoners were dead. This evening I went out to see if any new slugs had come up and couldn't find a single one. So it really worked, my grow bed is now slug-free.