As soon as the weather starts to get warmer, all gardeners panic about the imminent invasion of the garden slug. Slugs are a pest, (although they do offer a tasty treat to hedgehogs!) they will happily chomp their way through your flowers, herbs and any fruits and vegetables, and they can often devastate your favourite plants overnight!

Many people have different methods to control slugs in the garden, some will work very effectively everywhere, whereas others may only work under certain conditions.

A popular method for controlling slugs is beer. In fact this is a very old method, as is very effective, as long as you don’t have much rain, and you remember to remove the slugs and refill the beer every day. All you have to do is find a jam jar, pour some beer in the bottom. The dig a hole in your garden, place the jam jar in the hole, with the lip of the jar level to the ground. The idea here is that the slugs find the beer much more attractive than eating the plants, they go in the jar to investigate and then they find themselves stuck and can’t get out. This is a good method, as long as you are prepared to check the jar everyday. Some gardens may need quite a few jars depending on the size of the garden.

Chemicals are also an effective slug controller, however many people don’t like to use these. Chemicals normally come in the form of pellets, which you sprinkle around your plants, once the slugs come in to contact with the pellets they will die. These are fine for gardens with no animals, children or vegetables. However often these can be deadly to pets and children, as well as causing the chemicals to be absorbed into edible plants. So chemicals as a slug controller should be used with caution.

You can also buy copper strips and bands, which are designed to go around plants and pots. Slugs cannot cross these strips as their mucous reacts with the copper causing them to have a shock. This is probably not a good slug control method for people with large garden areas, but is very effective for use with smaller areas such as patio gardens, and window boxes.

There are more organic methods, which include spreading dry matter around the plants, which the slugs don’t like and will not cross. They are things like small stones that are covered in powder or even porridge oats. The one huge draw back with this kind of slug control is if the dry matter becomes wet it is no longer effective, which means after a bit of rain the slugs will get a feast!

By far the best slug controller is the nematode. As slugs live under the ground during the colder months, buy purchasing nematodes from your local garden centre, you can control them before they even start to appear. You buy these by volume to cover the area of you garden, mix them with water and water them into your garden. They will kill slugs and a number of other garden pests as well. These will cause no problems to your children, pets or your flowers and vegetables. In fact you will not even know they are there.

Slugs are a pest, and they do cause problems in most gardens, however there are many methods out there to control them. You should choose your method of slug control to suit your circumstances, take into account whether you are eating your plants, or if you have children and pets, before you buy your slug control.