Get Rid of Garden Slugs

Garden slugs are a big problem in my garden. Read about the method I use to fight garden slugs early and late, and still keep growing.

Our property borders a large natural area, with endless opportunities for slugs to breed and spread.

So many of us struggle with slugs in the garden. Spanish slugs. Killer slugs. Ugh. During my first years of growing, I actually didn’t have slugs on the property at all. But in later years, things have at times been sadly difficult. I try to comfort myself with the fact that I still grow a beautiful garden that gives me food, inspiration, joy, and a real desire to keep going, despite the slugs.

More about summer gardens: Ninnie's cottage garden

A lush, wild-growing property with lots of projects is of course perfect for slugs. But with the right method, it is still absolutely possible to grow vegetables here too.

Garden slug paradise

On a large property, especially one bordering land you do not own or manage yourself, it is very difficult to get full control over every surface where slugs might move around. It is completely unrealistic to mow everything. There isn’t even a lawn. There are thickets, raspberries, quackgrass. Large rocks, piles of lumber, some old rotting structure, or maybe a forgotten compost pile. A mower would not stand a chance here.

And these are not places where it is realistic to hand-pick slugs or cut them one by one. With a large property, a regular job, a family, and a life beyond the garden, most other things would have to be sacrificed just to keep up with slug picking. And the ones you remove are soon replaced by new slugs pouring in across the property lines.

So what do you do?

Get rid of garden slugs easily

Controlling slugs on a larger property requires different methods, or rather additional methods, than setting a few beer traps, cutting slugs, or putting copper tape on raised beds. You have to think bigger.

By country standards, our property is actually fairly small, about 27,000 square feet. But slugs do not care about property lines. Three sides of our lot border natural areas, and one side faces the slugs’ grand entrance, the gravel road. From a slug’s point of view, our house sits right in the middle of all the good stuff.

My strategy is to pick and kill every slug I happen to come across while I’m out working in the garden. But I no longer do regular rounds where I go out specifically to hunt, pick, or cut slugs. I do not make traps. And I do not use copper tape, slug fences, or other solutions that make the garden more complicated to work in.

Ferramol is a slug bait made up of pellets scattered on the ground. Here I cut slugs and dip the scissors into the pellets between each one, so that some of the pellets end up on the dead slugs too.

Ferramol, an approved slug bait

I use Ferramol as my main method for slug control. Ferramol is made up of small blue pellets scattered on the ground. The active ingredient is iron phosphate. The slugs eat it, feel full, crawl back to their hiding places, and die there. Any pellets left in nature break down and do no harm.

I use Ferramol in a way that works well on a wild-grown property and for a person who wants time for other things too. This is what I do:

I buy Ferramol in 11-pound bags. I use about three bags a year.
I divide the property into three sections.
One bag of Ferramol is divided into four containers, not three.
Evening 1: I walk around the entire property and scatter Ferramol a little way in from the full property line.
Evenings 2 to 4: I scatter Ferramol across one of the three sections each evening.

The reason I do this in the evening is that we have lots of jackdaws and magpies around our property. If I spread Ferramol during the day, the birds eat it. Once the pellets have become damp overnight, they are less appealing to birds. By then, they have also already had time to do their work, since slugs are most active at night.

I usually spread the work over a few evenings simply because I need time for other things too.

Fight garden slugs early and late

Exactly when I start my larger slug control varies. I often do a little early control in spring around the greenhouses. But the larger treatment is usually better saved until I can see that the slugs are actually starting to do damage in the beds. Often, it happens in early June after a rainy day, once the slugs have been fairly quiet through the very earliest part of spring. One treatment round like the one described above reduces the slug pressure a great deal in a short amount of time and is very effective.

You notice pretty quickly when the slugs start coming back in larger numbers, and then it is a good idea to do another round.

One tip for a larger property is to spread Ferramol once more later in the season, before the garden slugs settle in for their winter rest. September to October is usually a good time for me here in the south of Sweden, northern Europe, where I live. That reduces the number of slugs that overwinter and gives you a better start to the following season.