A good harvest depends not only on proper watering and fertilizing the soil, but also on protecting it from pests.
Birds, moles, mice, voles and a whole range of insects - from which I simply cannot save you! The former, fortunately, can be scared away with ultrasound or, as a last resort, get a couple of cats who will happily drive away birds and mice from the area. But what to do with such a phenomenon as slugs and snails? By the way, the latter sometimes turn into a real scourge for strawberries, and what’s most offensive is that you won’t poison the crop with chemicals either.
Slugs are surprisingly fond of citrus fruits, especially grapefruits, the peel of which can be used to make a wonderful trap. To do this, cut the grapefruit in half and remove the pulp of the fruit. Make a hole in each half, place it on a flat surface like a dome and leave overnight. In the morning, your enemies will gather under the peel, and you can easily get rid of them.
By the way, if in addition to gardening you are engaged in raising poultry, snails and slugs will be a wonderful feed for them. However, this does not mean that you need to release the bird into the garden beds, because even though it is domestic, the love for appetizing fruits is not alien to it.
If everyday assembly is difficult for you, you can try creating an obstacle course in the way of snails using eggshells, sand or sawdust.
Thanks to the sharp and rough edges, the listed remedies are too unpleasant for soft-bodied slugs, and in search of food they will bypass both the area with strawberries and the ground cucumbers surrounded by such a mound.
Note that you need to sprinkle each bush separately, and be sure to renew the protective layer after rain or watering.
When at rest, the mollusks are wide and short. When muscles contract, they suddenly become thinner and longer. On the surface of the body, such creatures secrete a large amount of mucus in the form of foam. It is necessary to protect it from drying out in too hot weather. This substance also prevents the slug from injuring its body during friction when it moves.
Their body color is gray-brown. In the head section, the mollusk has two pairs of special tentacles. At the end of the first are the eyes. The second pair is designed for tactile sensations.
Slugs are nocturnal. During the daytime, they carefully hide under the shade of strawberry leaf blades or under wood. Under the influence of ultraviolet radiation, these animals quickly dry out, which leads to their rapid death.
Harmful mollusks live for about 1-2 years. They lay their eggs once a year. Their number does not exceed forty pieces. After one month, the eggs hatch into full-fledged mollusks. They can grow to adult size in a couple of months.
Slugs most often feed not only on ripe young strawberries, but they also love the juicy leaves of this plant. In addition, there are several other important factors for the appearance of this pest on fruit beds:
The presence of slugs in your garden beds can be determined by several signs:
Many gardeners prefer traditional methods in the fight against slugs.
Gardeners often use various baits for them. So, you can place old boards, plywood or even roofing felt near the strawberry rows. It is also recommended to moisten the ground on which they will be located with water, this will further attract pests that quickly accumulate on such materials.
In order to get rid of these animals, you can scatter sharp barriers (pine branches, sharp gravel, sawdust, river sand) in different parts of your summer cottage. These mollusks cannot overcome such obstacles due to their special body structure.
Most gardeners in the fight against snails prefer proven and effective chemicals.
To prevent slugs from appearing in strawberry beds at all, you need to do some procedures regularly. Do not forget to promptly remove all debris and organic residues from the soil.
Remember that you should not feed them to poultry (chickens, roosters, ducks). After all, these mollusks are often carriers of various infections, which can cause animals to get sick and die.
Remember that they are also repelled by various odorous plants. Such plantings include garlic, sage and rosemary. You cannot water the rows too often. Excessively moist soil will only attract slugs and contribute to their spread.
Some gardeners advise planting strawberry seedlings in artificial raised beds. Their height must be at least 30 centimeters. Also, many advise periodically removing thickening from berry beds, as it attracts slugs and some other pests. To do this, the rows of seedlings need to be thinned out.
Do not forget to regularly weed and loosen the soil with strawberry plants. These procedures can be replaced by mulching. To prepare mulch, pine branches or chopped sawdust are most often used.
Slug attacks on strawberry plants often become a big disappointment for gardeners who do not want to share their harvest with these pests. Let's see what we can do to protect your berries.
Slugs are soft-bodied land mollusks without shells. Most of them feed on your strawberries at night, and during the day you can easily determine their presence by the characteristic traces of silvery mucus and damaged berries. The bad thing is that after the slugs, the damaged strawberries are attacked by other pests and diseases, access to which is opened by the damage.
To prevent slugs from becoming a problem for you, remove any debris, leaves and rocks that could harbor mollusks. Check to see if watering creates excess moisture that attracts slugs. If harmful mollusks are detected, reduce watering if possible, ideally switch to drip irrigation.
At the beginning of the season, some producers use small but effective tricks to prevent slug visits. They use plastic mulch or grow plants on black polyethylene covers because the clams don't like hot surfaces.
The most convenient time to identify these pests is at dusk. Wait about two hours after sunset, grab a flashlight and go searching. It is enough to carry out a preventive inspection once a week, but when there are a lot of slugs, you should not be lazy and conduct a raid every evening. After all, the safety of the harvest depends on it! Place the collected pests in a bucket of soapy water and then destroy them.
Another common control method is to create barriers made of diatomaceous earth or wood ash. But we must remember that such barriers lose all effectiveness if they get wet. There are commercial slug barrier products available that contain copper. When copper reacts with the mucus produced by the mollusk, the latter gets very unpleasant sensations and leaves the affected area. Slug barriers are created in a single line around the strawberry plants.
Do not use salt to create barriers! This increases the salinity of the soil, which is harmful to plants.
The third known method is to set traps. They may be different. For example, take a container that is deep and long enough, dig it level with the ground next to the garden bed, and then fill it halfway with beer. Slugs will not be able to resist the enchanting aroma of beer and, most likely, will safely drown during the tasting process.
Another trap option could be a simple wooden board, slightly raised with pebbles, under which the slugs will find their refuge and, ultimately, death from the owner of the site. To attract pests, place apple peelings, potato pieces and lettuce under the board. Also, crush one slug on the board and turn the board over and place it on the damp soil. A dead slug will attract living slugs, if there are any on the site. Such a trap must be checked in the morning, pests collected and the bait replaced.
You can easily and simply make a slug trap from a simple newspaper by rolling the sheets into a tube and securing the edges with electrical tape or paper clips so that the newspaper does not unfold. Place the resulting tunnel next to the strawberry plants and leave it for one day and overnight. Check in the morning - slugs like to hide in narrow, dark places.
After repelling the attacks of slugs, help strawberry plants restore strength and immunity by spraying them with liquid foliar fertilizers from the Folirus line - you can purchase foliar fertilizers for strawberries. We wish you a successful season and lots of delicious berries!
Protecting plants from slugs and snailsSeveral years ago, snails appeared in our dacha cooperative, first on the outskirts of the village, and then everywhere. Before that, only slugs bothered us, and in recent years, both of them. In some areas there were so many snails that summer residents collected them in buckets.
Snails and slugs eat everything: strawberries, vegetables, flowers, leaving behind pathetic twigs, and the fruits they gnaw disappear from fungal diseases or rot from the mucus that mollusks leave behind. During the day, especially in hot weather, they hide under leaves, boards, stones, and in the evening and at night they crawl out onto plants. Despite the fact that snails and slugs are gardeners, destroying dead plants, their huge numbers cause much more harm than the benefits they bring. And therefore we must fight them.
There are different ways.
1. Slugs and snails cannot tolerate the smell of parsley, garlic, sage, rosemary, so these plants, planted around the perimeter of the site, will repel pests.
2. Beds and flower beds can be protected if slaked lime, dolomite flour, crushed superphosphate or ground pepper, and salt are sprinkled around the perimeter. These substances irritate or dehydrate the delicate body and make movement difficult.
3. You can also sprinkle egg shells or fine gravel (?...) around the perimeter of the beds or flower beds, the sharp edges of which prevent crawling.
4. Slugs and snails prefer to eat berries, fruits, and vegetables, so they react to the smell, and, as gardeners have noticed, they really love beer. They can be collected in placed traps: cut plastic bottles in half, cut off the screw part from the neck, pour some beer into a glass, and cover it with the top of the bottle with the neck down. Dig this device into the soil. Slugs and snails will crawl into the bottle themselves, but will not be able to get out.
5. In order not to look for these pests throughout the garden, you can lay out boards, cardboard, and rags around the area where they will hide for the day and can be easily collected.
6. There are also chemical means of protection against slugs and snails, for example, the drug Meta, which is scattered over an area of 30 g by 10 m. This drug kills pests, but pets may suffer from it.
7. I recently learned about another method: lay copper wire or rings around the perimeter (beds or flower beds), they will repel, because upon contact an electric current will arise (?...). This method is new to me, I hope to test its effect in the summer.
In order not to have to fight snails and slugs, it is necessary to deprive them of their daytime shelter: mow the grass regularly, do not leave weeded weeds on the paths, remove boards and logs, and constantly loosen the soil so that they cannot hide there.
Using hot water against slugs
I heard from gardeners about harmless control methods related to the fact that high temperatures are unbearable for slugs.
One of the effective methods is when the beds are mulched with transparent film. At night, slugs gather under this film, and during the day, when the soil is heated by the rays of the sun, they die - they cannot withstand the resulting “steam room”.
On hot summer days, when there are no longer open areas of soil between the grown plants, resistant plants can be watered against slugs with hot water. Slugs die when treated with water heated to 40 degrees.
For example, cabbage can be watered over the leaves with fairly hot water (60 degrees).
The slugs die immediately as soon as this hot shower hits them. The cabbage does not suffer at all.
Treatment of plants with hot water should be done at dusk, when pests crawl onto the leaves.
Protecting plants from slugs
To protect individual plants from slugs, it is advisable to use dry mineral fertilizers (potassium salt, superphosphate), scattering them on the soil around the plant. Moreover, such processing alone is not enough. After all, slugs, after contact with these substances, trying to protect themselves from irritation, secrete a large amount of mucus and, along with it, throw off the drug that got on them.
Therefore, the first treatment only has a terrifying effect on slugs, and only the second guarantees complete destruction. The treatment interval is 30-40 minutes.
Special preparations (for example, “Meta”, “Thunderstorm”) also have a lethal effect on pests, but only if they hit the slug directly.
When using “chemicals” against slugs, remember that it is not safe for the garden soil, as well as for the beneficial creatures of the garden, and even for the gardeners themselves!
Pollination with chemicals should be stopped 3 weeks before fruits and berries ripen.
During this period, a mustard solution (150 g of dry mustard per 10 liters of water) can be used to treat plants against pests.
Pollination and spraying of plants against slugs is recommended late in the evening.
Mechanical controls for slugs and snails
Special traps for slugs and snails are a bowl covered with an umbrella-roof. The trap is installed in the ground so that the entrances to it are at the level of the ground surface. The bowl is filled with beer, fruit juice or other bait (the tasty smell attracts snails and slugs), and the roof over it prevents rainwater and debris from getting inside. In the absence of such a trap, pour the bait into simple bowls from an old unnecessary set and dig it flush with the surface of the soil in places with plants, most loved by snails and slugs. Check and empty traps regularly in the morning.
Maneuvers that distract snails and slugs include old leaves and tops of garden plants (lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, comfrey, etc.) scattered near the plantings. I successfully use this method in a greenhouse, which helps me keep not only slugs and snails, but also woodlice away from plants. Having become carried away by eating this waste, the pests no longer crawl to the vegetables growing in the greenhouse. I periodically collect drying waste and the pests that eat it, replacing green traps with fresh tops.
Phyto-control agents for slugs and snails
Plants that slugs and snails do not like and try to avoid include, first of all, garlic, as well as many (but not all!) aromatic plants (lavender, sage, hyssop, santolina, thyme or thyme, rosemary, bay, etc. ), which slugs and snails never touch.
Garlic is used by manufacturers for special herbal infusions that repel slugs and other pests from plants. In addition to garlic infusion, hot pepper infusion and mustard infusion are well-known folk remedies for fighting slugs and snails.
http://www.gardenia.ru
There are many ways, including dusting with ash, sprinkling with sand, etc., to make it difficult for them to crawl. Also use mechanical assembly - lay out planks, or better yet, burdock leaves. Snails love burdock and gather under it. Place them between the rows, then remove the snails from them. Belkina Svetlana
The poison doesn’t particularly affect them, sprinkle ash or metaldehyde around the plants (it’s called the Thunderstorm of Slugs) in the first case they don’t crawl on dry ground, in the second they burn their belly and die. Elena Orlova
Gather. Sprinkle the most valuable crops around with coarse salt or ground eggshells. They won’t crawl over their tender belly. Valentina Lichikova
These pests can be collected and destroyed or fed to chickens. To do this, you need to place pieces of slate in their feeding areas: slugs crawl under them at night, so during the day you just need to turn over the slate and collect the pests.
You can use a poison against slugs - metaldehyde, which is sold under the names "Meta" or "Thunder". Under each cabbage leg, next to the stem, place 3-4 metaldehyde granules. When slugs crawl onto the cabbage at night, they will burn their abdomen on these granules and die. But metaldehyde is a pretty strong poison, and you should be aware of it.
There is an old, ancient method against slugs: dilute 0.25 cups of 9% vinegar in a bucket of water and in the evening pour this solution over the top of the cabbage. There is another recommendation - twist a nettle stalk around the cabbage leg. Slugs are afraid of stings from nettles. True, in a humid summer when there is a large concentration of slugs on the site, they also eat nettles.
There is an interesting observation from gardeners: slugs love beer. In those places where pests have chewed out large holes on the leaves of plants, dig half-liter jars in the evening (the edges of the jars are level with the soil), pour beer on the bottom. The slugs will climb into the jars, flattered by the free drink, but they will not be able to get out of the glass jars; in the morning you will collect them in one jar and fill them with heavily salted water. After death, you can throw the slugs on the compost heap; birds will readily peck them. All these methods are also suitable for fighting snails. Galina
Mulch the soil with sawdust. Only if the sawdust is fresh, it is necessary to water it with a urea solution. Rotted sawdust works better. And one more thing: drinking coffee helps a lot. Caffeine, even in minimal quantities, paralyzes the nervous system of slugs and they die. Julia
http://ponarodnomu.ru/answers/a_rassada.htm
Under tomato, pepper or eggplant plants, which slugs are big fans of, you can place dried nettle plants. Slugs are afraid of them, and if there are a lot of nettles, they will prefer to avoid this place. Treat me to a beer! Slugs and snails cannot resist beer, even when it has expired (they are true connoisseurs of this drink and, according to German gardeners, prefer its dark varieties). You can take advantage of this addiction by digging glasses into the ground and filling them halfway with beer. Those who are especially immoderate simply drown in beer; those who are more temperate “fall off” next to the “life-giving source.” The method is original and, as they say, very effective - two or three such “feasts” and you can forget about slugs until the end of the season.
Instead of glasses, other containers will do. For example, in the lowest areas you can install a whole basin, or you can get by with glasses made from plastic bottles. Or take whole plastic bottles, pour in some beer and lay them flat on the ground, crumpling one side a little so that the bottles become flat and don’t roll around.
It is worth noting that mollusks especially avoid substrates such as ash, superphosphate or lime. Superphosphate, by today's standards, is, of course, an expensive thing, so it's easier to stick with ash or lime. Perhaps the simplest remedy is to sprinkle lime between the rows after rain or watering, when the slugs begin to actively move. When they fall on strips of lime, they burn their abdomen and die. You can take not pure lime, but mixed with ash or tobacco dust (1:1).
In the absence of rain, the soil is cultivated in this way late in the evening or at night, when the slugs are on the soil or on the plants. Soil treatment is repeated periodically (every 7-15 days), which leads to the gradual death of mollusks. The main thing when carrying out this procedure is to successfully select places for dispersing drugs in order to block the slugs’ main routes of movement. It should be borne in mind that filing is effective when the slugs are “grazing” - that is, after sunset.
You can sprinkle the ground with powders, for example, finely crushed iron sulfate mixed with sand. Slugs die from contact with this mixture. Very corrosive to slugs and soot. They do not like dry sawdust and avoid places coated with tar. The bushes were protected from them by making a ring of cotton wool, five cm wide, at the base of the trunk and coating it with tar or any sticky resin.
To protect garden strawberries, it is recommended to sprinkle the ground with spruce or pine needles or place a layer of spruce or pine paws on the soil. The needles will fall to the surface by themselves and serve as protection against slugs. In addition, they will protect the soil from drying out and then serve as fertilizer. And the skeletons of spruce and pine legs will serve as support for the berries, protecting them from contact with the ground. For dessert - grapefruit. 
American gardeners recommend a very original way of catching slugs using grapefruits: just take half a grapefruit peel, cut a small hole in it and install this dome-shaped trap. Attracted by the smell, the gastropods will gather under the peel overnight, and in the morning all that remains is to collect them and eliminate them by placing them in boiling water or a concentrated solution of table salt. However, in our conditions, it is easier to catch slugs in more accessible (and most importantly, available in any garden) traps. For the latter, ordinary cuttings of boards, pieces of slate or roofing felt, wet rags and burlap, linoleum, watermelon rinds, cabbage leaves, etc. are quite suitable - slugs like to crawl into such shelters for the day. And all you need to do is lay out all these items in the evening in suitable places, and in the morning go through and collect the mollusks hidden in the traps.
But here you need to regularly ensure that there are no gaps in the wall through which an insidious and voracious enemy can penetrate. Crushed river shells with sharp edges, which are scattered in ribbons between the beds, are considered an excellent means of repelling slugs.
http://www.vashsad.ua/plants/room_plants/vermin/articles/show/5896/
soak 1 kg of tobacco waste in 10 liters of water for a day, mix with green soap, strain and spray the plants;
Spray the leaves with a spray gel for stickiness, then sprinkle them with ground black pepper;
in the evening, water the plants from a watering can with a solution of ammonia (4 tablespoons per bucket of water); the product is harmless to plants;
water the crops with delphinium tincture (finely chop a pound of leaves and leave in a bucket of warm water for two days), mustard (100 g per bucket of water), hot pepper (1 kg of fresh or 0.5 kg of dried pods, pour in a bucket of water, leave for 2-3 days , boil and leave for another 2 days);
water with 0.01% coffee solution: dissolve a double dose of instant coffee in a cup of water.
The strawberries are ripening, and the garden beds at the dacha delight the eye with green, juicy leaves and ripening berries. But one fine day you discover that disgusting slippery slugs have appeared on them, and the ripe red berries have been eaten and are not suitable for picking! How to protect berries without using chemicals? How to get rid of slugs on strawberries, because otherwise there will be no harvest?
Fighting slugs manually
The most labor-intensive method to help effectively get rid of slugs on strawberries is to collect the pests by hand. But what to do, because the berries are already ripening, and it’s too late to use chemicals, and in general it’s undesirable, because you want to grow healthy produce in your garden. Hand-collected slugs should be taken away and burned.
Wood ash will help get rid of slugs on strawberries
Another way to help get rid of slugs is to use ash. Regular wood ash. If you don't have a stove, you can get ash after a fire. First, sift it, and then spray it over the beds. Of course, the berries will become dirty from the ash, but you can wash them, but you will no longer see slugs on the strawberries.
Beer - slug trap on strawberry
To get rid of slugs on strawberries, many gardeners set up beer traps. To do this, pieces of rags are moistened in beer and laid out between the bushes in the garden bed. Slugs love dampness. They are hot during the day, so they will bunch up on the wet cloth and you can easily collect them. Snails are also caught this way.
Mulching with sawdust to combat slugs on strawberries
It will not be difficult to get rid of slugs on strawberries if you mulch the beds well with a thin layer of small sawdust - this is something that pests definitely do not like.
Mustard powder or salt
Mustard powder or salt will also help in controlling pests; they are scattered around the plants. These caustic substances are destructive to the delicate skin of slugs and become a serious obstacle in their path. You can use a strong solution of table salt to spray the strawberries.
A decoction of capsicum will help get rid of slugs on strawberries.
Spraying strawberries with dry powder or a decoction of hot capsicum is considered an effective remedy against slugs on strawberries. To prepare a decoction, 0.5 kg of dry pepper pods are infused in 10 liters of water for 2 days, then boiled and infused for another 1 day. To spray, the solution must be diluted in a proportion of 0.1-0.5 liters per 10 liters of water and add 40 g of finely ground laundry soap (for better adhesion).
Coffee is an effective slug repeller on strawberries
According to recent research by scientists, caffeine has a detrimental effect on the nervous system of slugs and snails. A 1-2% coffee solution can kill a large individual, and a 0.1% solution repels most pests in a summer cottage. To prepare a 0.1% coffee solution, you need to dilute a double dose of instant coffee in a cup of water or pour drunk coffee grounds under the plants (which, by the way, is also a good remedy for preventing “blackleg”).
We hope that these simple tips will help you effectively get rid of slugs on strawberries in a short time without the use of chemicals.
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