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Hi! I am Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom. Heading into my garden with some oats and some beer, you might be thinking, “This is kind of a weird video, why is he holding oats and beer?” but, it is really relevant what we are going to talk about today. What we are going to talk about today are slugs. My least favorite critter in the garden, they are gross, I do not like touching them. They leave slime all over the place. They eat the leaves, they eat the plants, they are just not a great thing. I do not really know a good use for the slug in the garden. I am sure there is one, but I do not know of it. So, I am going to talk about how to control them a little bit. Beer and oats are two ways you can actually help control slugs naturally and organically. The beer, you basically just take a beer, pour it in a shallow dish and I did this last night for you guys. And if you look, you have got this disgusting slug in there but it is dead, that is the good news. So they like the beer. They like the beer more than they like your plants. It is important you use a shallow dish, you do not want something that is 4 or 5 inches. This is only about a half an inch deep, because the slugs need to be able to crawl into the dish.
The other thing you can do are just sprinkle some oats around. You might be thinking, oats, why the oats? Well, the oats are dry and if you think about when you cook oats, what happens to them? The expand. So, one of the reasons why when you eat oats, you feel a little bit fuller. They are expanding in your stomach. Same thing happens to the slugs, except it kills them, it expands too much. So, a great way to control them, just sprinkle the oats around your plants. And there you go you have the oats sitting there, the slugs will eat them and it will help control them.
How do you know you have slugs? Well, a couple of ways, if you look at these leaves, really closely, on the peas, see how the margins are kind of eaten. Now, you might think, “Well, how do I know that is not a beetle or some sort of other bug?” If you look for a little bit of a glistening around the area that has been eaten, that is the telltale sign that it is slugs, not some other critter. Sometimes if you come out very early in the morning or late in the evening just before sunset and it is damped, you will see them moving around on your plants.
So, there you have it, how to get rid of slugs pretty easily, effectively, and organically. What could be better? Come back every week for all of our tips, hints and helps at GrowingWisdom.com.
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