First of all, thanks to Charles. “Organic gardening” is one of my main reference books, and it is also great to see so much info in this website.
Now, getting down to business. I live and garden in SW Galicia, which is a cold, damp and extremely rainy place (not much unlike the British Isles). I used to think that growing vegetables with a straw mulch on top was beyond my possibilities due to the huge numbers of slugs&snails that gather under the mulch, but I’ve started trying a new way to deal with them. Apparently, their function is not to eat normal, healthy leaves (which they don’t particularly like), so if you give them something nice to eat they leave your plants alone. It is also important to remove wilting leaves (for example after transplanting), so that they don’t get tempted to eat the wilting leaf and get carried away. More info:
You can make wee piles of wilting weeds, but a cheap and more convenient alternative is bran. There is a myth around the Internet that it somehow swells inside them and kills them, but it is definitely not true (I kept several for a while on bran and they kept as healthy as a fish). What happens is that they prefer to gorge on the stuff instead of ravaging your plants (they may take an occasional nibble, but they go back to the bran [this may be a problem for very young seedlings]). Some sources recommend about one handful every half metre or so, or a line around the plants, but I have tried also with jars on their side, so that rain does not fall on the bran, and each jar seems to protect about 3 to 5 metres. I’ve been trying this for over a month now and I can see the little scroungers tucking in but leaving my carrots, tomatoes, aubergines, cucumbers, asparagus, courgettes, melons, dill and basil alone. This was too good not to share.
Nice method Francisco, thanks for sharing it. Its another way, and I certainly agree that slugs are dealing with weak and decaying leaves, hence a good plan to keep the plot tidy.
