With the wet and warm weather recently, there has been a deluge of slugs who are busy chomping up my salads and leaving slimy trails on my tomatoes. Urggh- I have looked at them and can’t seem to like them. In fact I think I prefer spiders to slugs! Having read many tips from books and on the internet, I have settled on one tip that works brilliantly on container gardens. That are egg shells. They are cost free in the sense that they are waste products of the eggs one has eaten. They are natural and easy to use. I collect them and then put them in a plastic bag and crush them. Then I lay the pieces in the containers.
The crushed eggshells deter not just slugs but also snails and cutworms because they can’t slither across the sharp edges of the shells. As a bonus, the egg shells also contain calcium that the plants love. If you have a compost pile, then putting these into it gives a calcium rich compost which are good for your tomatoes. If you like feeding birds, then crush up the eggshells and add them to a dish near the feeder. Female birds, particularly those who are getting ready to lay eggs or recently finished laying, require extra calcium and will benefit from the extra calcium.
The Canny Gardener 