How to Protect Your Garden From Slugs and Snails

By eHow Home & Garden Editor

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Many gardeners find that after all their hard work, they have inadvertently created a free salad bar for slugs and snails. Putting down barriers that slugs can't cross is, perhaps, the best way to protect your garden from these common pests. Keep them from entering and you won't have to use pesticides.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Calcified seaweed
Ashes
Lime
Cinders
Soot
Oak leaves
Thorny clippings/Holly leaves
Pine needles
Crushed eggshells
Chalk
Sand

Step1

Water your garden only in the early morning, or use an underground irrigation pipe. This will keep the top of the soil dry and uninviting to slugs and snails.

Step2

Spread dry soot, dry ashes, dry lime, sharp cinders and dry chalk around plants or beds. Any one of these or several in combination should do the trick.

Step3

Rough, sharp sand is another option. Use it the same way as the materials in Step 2.

Step4

Try calcified seaweed or crushed eggshells as a barrier.

Step5

Another barrier material is clippings from thorny roses or holly leaves. Rosa rugosa (Japanese rose) clippings are good.

Step6

Spread pine needles in your garden (these are also good mulch for strawberries).

Step7

Spread chopped hair (human hair is fine) in your garden.

Step8

Try using oak leaves as a barrier. Slugs and snails don't like the tannin in the leaves.

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Comments

kmatt said

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on 6/2/2008 putting copper tape around plant pots will stops slugs and snails, also placing traps in the border such as upturned pots and grapefruit skins will make snails cluster in them, so during the day this will make them easy to collection

Blackbear said

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on 12/8/2007 Be careful adding the pine needles to the soil around your flowers as this will create an acidic soil. You can buy a powdered lime to sprinkle on the soil to prevent this from happening.