Killing slugs for fun and (not really) profit
July 23, 2008 by Badbadivy · 7 Comments
Ivy says:
Oh, Twitter, how I love thee. I tweeted recently that I’m very short on ideas for Home Ec 101 lately and I got this tweet:
You can tell me about how to get all the slugs that have taken over my backyard, dog bowls, and screen doors to die or getting them to die without hurting the dogs or the cat or my bushes. They are grossing me the (censored) out.
Well, dear Twitter friend, they gross me the (censored) out, too. There are only 2 things on this planet that make me so intensely grossed out that even the thought of them makes me barfy. The first one is maggots (I saw Poltergeist at a very young age) and the second one is slugs.
So, there are several ways of getting rid of slugs. Theoretically, it’s fun to pour salt on them and watch them die. I’m too grossed out by that to even consider that as a method of slug murder, but there is that.
You can prevent slugs from living at your house by making sure the bottom branches of all your bushes are trimmed. Slugs love damp, moist areas, so if you trim the bottom branches from your bushes, the damp and moist areas are not so plentiful and they’ll go find somewhere else to live.
Probably the most fun method of killing slugs involves making them a beer swimming pool. Take a somewhat shallow container (like a Cool Whip container, after you’ve eaten all the Cool Whip, ha!) and bury it in the ground so the lip of the container is even with the ground. Then fill it up with beer. The slugs will be attracted by the beer and will come on in, but won’t be able to get out and will drown. If you feel like that’s a waste of good beer, you can do the same with a packet of yeast and some water.
Another method of keeping slugs away from a certain area is to protect that area with copper edging. That’s a bit on the spendy side, but apparently slugs don’t dig copper and would stay off your back porch.
Finally, you can use an iron phosphate bait like Escar-go! to kill them. Iron phosphate messes up something in a slug’s metabolism so they end up starving to death. Man, killing slugs is mean. 
