I hope they work out for you! They run ~10-12¢ a bag, but it was worth it for us as a one-time expenditure to not have birds getting caught in netting covering the grapevines, or finding a way in and being unable to get out.
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In my experience “Sluggo” works great. I think rats eat it though 
so get some rat traps too 
Lots of cigarette butts seems to eventually do it too 
don’t smoke sluggo
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So I just sprinkled our version of sluggo, same stuff in it, around my plants, only to think “hey maybe I should research this “safe for pets and plants” stuff” and what do you know, I find out it’s not safe at all and increases the amount of heavy metals the plants will take up from the soil 
oh and it also kills earthworms. The active ingredient isn’t actually iron phosphate, it’s EDTA which frees enough iron from the phosphate to cause iron poisoning, and EDTA is actually more poisonous than the metaldehyde slug pellets. They don’t list EDTA though because they report it to be an inert ingredient so they don’t need to list it.
Studies done with the active ingredients showed that slugs and snails could live off a diet of it indefinitely. Though with EDTA in it, well, the first dogs that ingested it are history.
To make matters worse, despite it’s label saying it’s allowed in organic produce crops, it’s a persistant pollutant.
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put out a saucer with bone meal on it. Go out after dark with a pair of scissors and kill them. Do that a few nights and you will greatly reduce the problem. Plant something else as a sacrificial crop. They eat potatos and chard here…keeps them away until the plants are bigger. I have a pair of scissors stationed in the potato patch just for slugs.
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Lost a bunch of pepper and watermelon seedlings this year to snails and slugs. I thought I over planted seeds and ended up a month behind in my garden from needing to replant. Made a beer moat using an upside down tote lid with the seed trays in the middle. Used steel wool around the container’s brim last year.
In an act of resignation I put the surviving mangled pepper stems with slivers of cotyledons in the ground along with a few spared healthy ones. Watermelons had nothing left. I have a bunch of shredded paper so I used it as a mulch around the base to about 8 inches out. I noticed the snails and slugs seemed to prefer the paper more than the transplanted seedlings. Once it gets wet and starts breaking down it creates a somewhat impermeable layer and there really isn’t a place for the slimy little shits to sleep during the day like wood bark or other loose type mulches would allow. I’m completely speculating though, I probably just got lucky that my garden location is less hospitable to them due to increased daylight and heat than where I sprouted the seeds.
Didn’t do squat for the deer though.
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Slugs can hibernate for months and they live mostly in the soil, and they’ve seen the dino’s getting on stage and disappearing again, just like sharks, cockroaches, spiders and scorpions. We’re not going to be able to dwindle their numbers by that much…
Around here the snal causing the most trouble is the Spanish road snail. They eat a shitload, get bit, and have colonized incredibly well here as an invasive species.
Learning a lot about slugs n snails. The leopard snail eats other snails so that one i’ll leave alone from now on. I’m debating taking the industrial vacuum cleaner out without a bag in it to remove the pellets again after most snails are gone. Yet to go out for slug collection today. Collected over a pound yesterday.
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For me the worst thing is the damn caterpillars that burrow into the buds and cause bud rot during the end of flower. I sprayed BT several times last year and still got the little bastards. I’m thinking it has to be sprayed twice a week or something. Either that or they’ve become immune. They can ruin the whole harvest.
Slugs are another problem for me when the plants are small. I try and keep them in pots and on a saucer or up on something. I lost several plants to them even in pots and on gravel… bastards
I can tell you another pest! Fucking birds!!! It never fails when I only have a few seeds the birds eat the sprout. That’s happened a few times.
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Sure it hasn’t been mice?
Beginning of this year I planted about 110 seedlings. Had a pretty good germ rate, around 105 seedlings came up. Went to take them outside and placed them in a shed to plant the next day. Next day I had 27 seedlings IIRC.
Mice. That was the drop, I made the decision to get 2 feral cats and they actively take care of that problem. Cleaning up about 5 to 10 mice a week now between me and the misses.
My chickens will mostly leave the plants alone, but they have the tendency to scratch the roots bare and take the nametags out of the soil.
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What kills those bright orange worm looking things that killed 40% of my crop a couple years ago lol no but for real what kills those
what are they called? Spanish road slugs? Or is it actually a worm? maggot?
and since when does grasscity carry that idiotic FDA disclaimer, jeez
Ok, a couple things here, one, I have been spraying with Earth Ally organic insecticide, which is purely plant oils, seems to wear off quickly although we have had a lot of rain. It does not seem to affect the rainbow colored hoppers, and the assassin bugs, the latter which are welcome.
However, I found this goey slime with what looked like bubbles in it? Now I do have an old pool with a ton of frogs, and found a little tiny green guy in my plants last year also welcome. Here’s a pic
I’m also seeing early mites and maybe spiders, so I may have to get a little more aggressive, found this creepy looking beetle too.
Thoughts?
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The frothy stuff is from spittlebugs, they don’t do much damage themselves but they can bring in diseases from time to time.
Personally, I don’t worry about them. I’ve only encountered them one year and I’ve never seen them in high numbers.
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Metaldehyde pellets works for me. Cheap at the hardware store/garden shop.
Never saw any more a week after a treatment and they got my Hostas bad a couple years back.
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Yes, and they are also poisonous to my chickens sadly. Chickens, when surrounded by other chickens, tend to try and pick up and gobble down whatever they think is food faster than another chicken can see that they have found something. So more often than not, if they encounter a poisonous thing that they don’t know is poisonous (poisonous beans, peas and human made poison being most likely to be accidentally ingested).
Now the current pellets add a real nice stupid factor to it: they list it as non-poisonous, so don’t add bittrex, so it doesn’t taste foul, but it actually IS poisonous.
I think I will end up taking the industrial vacuum cleaner outside and suck em back up again cause I spread out like 5 times the recommended amount and I think in 1 night 90% of the slugs were gone cause I’m only picking up a tiny fraction of the amount I caught the first morning.
Meanwhile, my wife who clogged the toilet and probably burst our pipes flushing kitty litter against my and the manufacturer’s recommandation tried to fix the issue that she brought into existence (now months ago, not that she hasn’t been trying to get it fixed, luckily we still have another working toilet) and in doing so she managed to get her father’s pressure washers’ sewer cleaning utensil stuck way deep down inside the sewer pipe.
So now on top of all the other work I need to get done and probably have too little time for this year leading to a giant increase in my stress levels, I also have to remove the clinker stones and dig up the sewer pipe, open it up, remove the utensil, and then place a port on the sewer where I can access it should there be a need for it later.
All this is for a toilet that will be gone probably next year.
And right now, it kinda looks like the whole system is filled up with water and sewer sludge.
And I’m the lucky guy who can start to open those up, while filled.
And to make all this a little more interesting, I have only 2 small nugs of weed left and it’s the first time I’m running dry in over 10 years I think.
NOW WHO WANTS TO JOIN ME? 
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Last one is an Oriental Beetle… I’ve been seeing a large number of them this year (I’m not all that far from you so not terribly surprising). At first I thought they weren’t an issue, but they’re definitely eating my plants (albeit slowly). Googling a bit it looks like they prefer grass, but I dunno.
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Well that’s a problem cause we’re all growing God’s Grass!
They’re just wising up, discovering there’s better grass to gobble up.
I don’t have any outdoor weed, but have been waging war on ants in my house. We can’t leave out terro bc 2 cats and a 1 year old. If there’s even a tiny crumb of food anywhere in the front of the house (aka where the dining room table/high chair is), boom, ants everywhere. So I end up waging war on the little fuckers with my bare hands. They’re so small you have to really crush em. For a while I was decapitating them with a quarter lol but fingertips is quicker. Anyway, I’ve told these ants you cross that threshold, you forfeit your life, but they either don’t care or don’t understand haha.
We’ve had a dry summer so the veggies out back are mostly pest free. Got a bunch of aphids on some native perennials though. And a goddamn squirrel or bunny killed my Mexican torch sunflower the other day. Was looking forward to that one.
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Get an ant burner. I believe the store calls them weed burners, but we got lighters for that
The little sugar ants? The ones that smell like rosemary when you crush 'em?
We have those by the boatloads this year. Banner year for insects (the mosquito sitch is… super gross).
Where I used to live we had Pharaoh ants. They live in stone buildings in the crevices, are immune to ant poisons, and when you attack their homes with boiling water they scatter out, and a bunch of them will then turn into queens and each one will try (and some will inevitably succeed) to establish a new colony in other newfound crevices in the building. They are only about 1.5mm in length and are very resistant to finger crushing, only being crushed by applying A LOT of force on a fingertip or using the fingernail.
We just made peace with them. I saved a bunch of them inside a seedtube in some ethanol for my oldest son who is mad about insects. They mostly go after protein sources and were mostly a seasonal problem so we managed by placing our cat’s kibble bowl inside a slightly bigger bowl of water.
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