Last year I lost all of my favourite lemon balm plants and many seedlings of milk thistle and marigold (Calendula) to slugs. Obviously this year I want to stop this happening! Where possible in my herbal practice I stock organically cultivated or wildcrafted herbs, so I certainly didn’t want to start using toxic chemicals in my own medicinal herb garden.
After having a bit of a read and on the advice of a friend it seemed like slug traps using beer as a bait might be a solution, and also using copper tape around seedlings as slugs do not like crawling over copper. I read up on a couple of designs and this gave me an idea of how I could reuse empty stock tincture bottles to make slug traps and barriers, which has the added advantage of reducing waste.
For the slug barriers around plants or seedlings if the plants are in a pot you can buy sticky backed copper tape and just simply stick it in a complete circle around the pot. However I wanted to protect marigold seedlings that have self-seeded from those that did survive last year, and I didn’t want to disturb the seedlings by digging them up.
What I did was to chop both ends off a plastic tincture bottle (any bottle will do), and put the copper tape around the top part (see the pictures). The bottle is then pushed into the ground around the seedling so that the only way the slug or snail can get at the plant is by crawling over the copper, which they don’t like to do.
For the slug traps I used square tincture bottles (any square container with a lid can be used) and cut four slits in the side, leaving the top part attached but folded up to stop rain filling the bottle. I then dug the bottles into the ground and added some beer to entice the slugs in (from the research I did beer seemed like the best bait). You can use any beer and a 2% alcohol one is fine (if you have a stronger beer you can dilute it).
I’ll let you know how well my plants survive this year!
