Natural Gardening

Natural Slug Treatments

• FLOWER POT - Prop a flower pot upside down with a stick to allow the slugs to get in. Check the pot toward the end of the day and remove the slugs.
  
• BEER - Place old plastic containers in the soil around damaged plants and fill with beer. Dump in the morning. Repeat every evening.
  
• COFFEE GROUNDS - Surround the damaged plants with coffee grounds. Slugs won't want to cross and you'll fertilize your soil.
  
• VINEGAR - Spray vinegar on slugs that aren't on your plants. It will kill them, just don't spray on your plants, it will kill those too.
  
• Toads, rove beetles, lightning bugs, and ducks all eat slugs or their eggs.. I'm fresh out of the first three in the Northwest and somehow I think putting a duck in the garden would be a detriment to my garden, not just the slugs.
  

 

Natural Grasshopper Treatments

• Chickens will eat grasshoppers if they have access to them. My problem is that our chickens don't have access to our garden or my greenhouse.
  
• Sink glass jars into the soil. Fill to the halfway point wit a mixture of 10 parts water to 1 part of molasses. The hoppers are drawn to the sweet smell of the molasses, they dive in and drown. Clean traps as needed.
  
• Black Strap Molasses: combine 4 ounces of this with one quart of water. Spray directly on hoppers. This will clog their pores so they cannot breath resulting in their death.
  
• The other encouraging thing I read is that there are worms that eat grasshopper eggs and when grasshopper populations go up, then the worm populations go up and then eventually grasshopper egg populations go down.
  

Also, just a note in years past, we've dealt with other problems.

We've dealt with flea beetles on our tomatoes. I was happy to treat my tomatoes with a concoction made of garlic, hot peppers, onions that I sprayed on my fledgling tomatoes. It worked. It kept them off enough for the tomatoes to develop. And, funny thing is we haven't had a problem with those since.

Last year we had corn borer worms in our corn. We just cut off the ends of the corn and we put that end of the corn in our burn pile. It was a pain, but we didn't have a repeat with the corn this year.

It's cyclical and rather than killing off all bugs and creating super bugs and risking potentially harmful residues, I'd rather take the extra steps.

Oh...and...I'll just have to learn that things don't have to be perfect.