pepper4
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salty slugs

Went to nursery and asked about getting rid of slugs. 3 suggestions, some chemical pellets you scatter in garden, beer , or salt. Salt? Said sprinkle the slugs with salt and it kills them. :shock: Opinions :?: Now I could see doing that if you had one here and there but not hundreds like I've read some have had. Any opinions on the salt theory?? Thanks!

The Helpful Gardener
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It is chemical warfare on slugs and it is not for the faint of heart; it dissolves them completely. Pretty gross...in a fascinating and satisfying way... :twisted: Still, salt and plants are not a good mix (one more reason I am no fan of chemical fertilizer as it is an ammonia salt)...

HG

2cents
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Salt & Slugs, bet there will interesting shades of brown, green and black.

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Kisal
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Salt definitely kills slugs. Personally, I'd rather just squash them. When you salt them, they writhe around and exude so much slime, that it's obviously a painful way for them to die. At least it seems so to me. I don't mind killing them, but I'd like it to be as quick and painless as possible. Just my ... probably weird ... opinion. :roll:

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!potatoes!
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I've got a jar half-full of fairly salty water. does the trick, even if it's in a manual way.

cynthia_h
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Kisal wrote:... Personally, I'd rather just squash them. ... I don't mind killing them, but I'd like it to be as quick and painless as possible.
I feel this way, too. Those slugs and snails need to return the calcium and other elements they STOLE FROM MY PLANTS back to those plants RIGHT NOW. This Instant! But I won't become a torturer of creatures who are just following their own life path. The slugs and snails I dispatch never know what hit 'em. And my earth is not salted (anyone else remember what the Romans did to Carthage?).

The swift trowel of justice. Or whatever...

Cynthia H.
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The Helpful Gardener
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Elaine Ingham talks all the time about what Rome did to Carthage, which was an oasis at the time (there are archaelogical records of rivers, papyrus, hippos giraffes, lions...), now there is a desert. One wonders if the coincidence even IS a coincidence... :? Birthplace of the Sahara?

But slugs are a lower trophic order in a food web we have disturbed and eliminated much of the predators of slugs from. So we are forced to become part of the solution; pick your poison (in a most literal way). Such is the nature of Nature... I like my poisons in a preventative fashion, and toads are wonderful slug killers; they have very few qualms about it... 8)

HG



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