Snails chew on garden plant leaves and stems, which cause frustration because your hard work is wasted and there is no food. Why? They don’t follow the rules of organic gardening or listen to any chemical restrictions.
They’re tenacious pests who will eats anything in their path. To stop them, one needs to understand where they come from, and that’s just the first part of equation. The second is disrupting their life cycle.
That means removing their habitat, which most people fails to do when trying to stop snail. They treat the symptom, rather than the disease. To protect your garden, you need to think like a snail.
How to Identify and Control Garden Snails
Understanding the Snail Life Cycle
Know where he hides and know what she want. Then, make your yard less inviting different than the surrounding areas. But you didn’t bring in a plant, you brought in a source of potential pest to come.
How Snails Enter Your Garden
This is how many gardener inadvertently introduce snails: Buying nursery-potted plants that has snail eggs already in their mulch and root balls. Those eggs resemble tiny pearls. They’re barely visible, and dormant, until they hatch, in your pot.
Eliminating Moist Hiding Spots
And once they do, they becomes a bigger problem. The key to eliminating snails is to reduce moisture. Their infestation can be traced to several factor that create a moist habitat: heavy mulch, poor drainage or low-lying spots, and areas covered with thick foliage that acts like a cool, shady house for them.
They love cool, shady places, including under rocks, wood chips, and dense foliage. Making the garden unattractive to snails is half the battle, remove all such hiding place. Make them have to come out into the open where you can get at them.
Using Copper Tape as a Barrier
That change the layout of the garden to help you. Your first line of defense are physical barriers. For example, copper tape is effective (it emits a slight electrical charge that deter them when their slimy bodies encounter it).
That sounds strange, I know, but apparently it do deter many species of snails. Just lay the copper tape in raised beds, or wind it around the rims of pots. Since the copper wears out eventually, this isn’t a longterm fix, either.
Setting Beer Traps for Snails
But it will prevent the initial attack from reaching your prize possessions. It is simple but effective: snails will climb into a trap and die. Fermented yeast attracts them, so beer traps is popular.
Simply place a cup into the ground, pour some brew inside, and wait for a snail to climb in and drown. Maintenance required, but also humanely organic. On the industrial side of things, there are iron phosphate baits.
Applying Iron Phosphate Baits
Sluggo and similar products mess up the snail’s digestive tract. Because they’re harmless to wildlife and pets (a big plus versus older poisons), the slugs and snails simply quits eating, go into hiding and die naturaly. To be effective with any type of pest control, timing is everything.
Timing Your Pest Control Efforts
Applying controls during the heat of high noon will simply waste your time; snails are at their noisiest when you’re not! Since you can’t reach those lurking underground under debris or deep in the soil, they is safe from you. Time your treatment to do it either early morning or evening, when the snails is out and about.
Maintaining Consistent Snail Prevention
And thus vulnerable. If you catch them in this moment, it makes all the difference in the long run. Controlling snails is a game of whack-a-mole, and one I never win unless I stay consistent.
No one wins by doing just one thing; it takes diligence on the part of the gardener, keeping an eye out for them, denying them water (meaning keeping the garden clean) and keeping up the assault. It’s a slog. But there are no other way around it.
The only way to prevent them from taking over is to do the right things consistantly, keep them off balance. This is your garden, after all; a place where you can feel welcome (and not theirs). Don’t let those snails make it a food court.
It’s time to reclaim your territory and keep fighting the snails.
