Veg

[gib]

Good evening to you all.

When growing veg how does one deal with my dear friends the slugs and the snails
As much as I enjoy feeding them, they are not my sole purpose of caring for the produce.

 

[veganwoman]

slugs like shady moist areas like wooden plank, cardboard boxes, flower pots. U can set these up and then check them daily then gather the slugs up and carry them safely away from your veg garden. To attract them to the cardboard , flower pot or wooden planks you can add cabbage, or citrus peels moistened with water or dry cat /dog food.
u can surround the plants with sand or soot. Slugs don't like how dry it is.
Planting sage nears the veggies can help . Slugs and snails hate sage.

Good luck!

 

[Christine]

Last summer I found myself similarly dealing with a 'snail apocalypse': had no idea how they would all descend in hordes on my American Giant sunflower shoots every night!
I'm ashamed to say back then I used nasty chemical pellets to keep them at bay, which makes me feel rather guilty, now. It also didn't stop them from trying to get at my sunflowers very consistently.
Since then, I've read of alternatives to chemical snail/slug-control, including surrounding your plants with dishes filled with beer to divert the animals - but this would surely kill them too if they crawled in and couldn't escape. I did also surround my flowers with a good amount of gravel near the end to help keep them at bay, but they still seemed willing to brave the trek just to get at the plants!
I also read that winding copper tape of a certain width around the stems of your plants or their pots prevents slugs and the like from climbing up. Apparently, the copper will deliver tiny little shocks when in contact with the slugs/snails, which... isn't exactly nice for them either, but would perhaps provides a better alternative.

 

[HaplessHeather]

Being a vegan gardener brings about a lot of interesting conundrums. Getting the soil nutrition you need without using animal-based soil amendments can be hard. Animal manure, blood meal, bone meal, feather meal, fish emulsion, the list of commonly used animal-based amendments goes on and on. There are garden shops in my area that carry "vegan mix" fertilizer and plant-based compost, but using these the soil health in my garden is still not great and my veggies don't produce that well. Then there's the question of keeping away all the critters that like to eat your garden, from insects to rabbits to deer. And MOLES, who make a gargantuan mess out of my entire yard every year. I've tried every humane method out there to encourage them to find somewhere else to hang out, and they've all failed.

The weird thing about all of it is, for most of the year when my garden is dormant, I buy my produce at the farmers' market or the supermarket, which means I'm paying someone else to use pesticides and animal-based soil amendments on their farm. I've toured and visited a lot of local organic farms, and they also use kill-traps for rabbits and moles...so by proxy I'm paying for that lovely practice as well, if I buy vegetables at their farm stand. But if you follow that train of thought too far, the only way to be a good vegan is to starve!

My advice is, find some environmentally friendly/organic products to eliminate or reduce pests in your garden. It's a necessary evil in food production. Every time you buy an apple at the store (even if it's an organic apple), you are contributing to the use of pesticides...so you might as well do what you need to succeed at growing veggies at home.

 

[HaplessHeather]

(oops, double post...deleting...)