This morning was relatively warm and fairly dry.
If you’ve been following the details of my campaign to control the back yard gastropod population, you know what that means:
Hardly any gastropods were out to be picked.
On the plus side, this means I was able to get another day out of the SBMD I prepared three mornings ago. But it also means that the slimy hoards are hunkered down somewhere, out of my clutches, waiting until the conditions are right for them to slither out of hiding and munch on my plants.
I’ll grant, though, that the slithering will probably be relatively slow. Perhaps I’ll have time to intercept them.
Actually, as I was hunting through the dry leaves and stems today, I thought to myself that it would be very useful, on a morning like this, to be able to replicate the conditions of a good snailing day, quickly, in a small sector of the yard. That way, I could pick that sector clean of gastropods (rather than trying to patrol the whole yard in the available time). And the next dry morning, I could turn on the good-snailing conditions in a different sector.
If I could get my mad scientist mojo going and build a small-scale weather control device …
But probably that’s not going to happen until we’re done with the kids’ science fair projects.
Today’s take: 19 slugs and 1 snail.
Isn’t that a watering can?
Simple enough to provide attractive housing and conditions for your snails and slugs. An unglazed tile propped up on bricks so there is a gap of an inch or so between the roof and the ground makes for a nice, and easy to clean out, shelter for snails. The unglazed clay seems to work best but a scrap piece of plywood would work.
You could work the moisture levels by using a lawn sprinkler on an otherwise dry day. A good watering should bring them out and when you turn off the water and it dries a bit the slugs will naturally seek out cool dark places to hide. If you place your tile shelter well odds are a good number of slugs will favor them and be caught when you check them.
A friend used to maintain several of these shelters around his organic garden and found that over time he developed a resident population of toads that helped control the insects. I’m not sure if they helped with slugs. Do toads eat slugs?