From ground coffee to crushed eggshells: Expert-approved methods to keep slugs away from your garden
Snails will stay away from your plants if you use the right repellents
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Snails and slugs become more active around springtime as garden beds fill with their favourite foods.
The greedy gastropods will munch on pretty much anything that crosses their path as long as it’s plant-based.
Although the market is brimming with harsh insecticides to keep slugs at bay, controlling their numbers can be done organically too. This will also cause less damage to your garden.
The key to keeping gardens safe may be sitting in your compost, as coffee grounds and eggshells are detested by snails.
Slugs can eat plants in the gardenPAJamie Shipley, gardening expert and managing director at Hedges Direct, said: “Although slugs are active all year round, their activity will start to ramp up as we enter spring and conditions become warmer and damper.
“Spring can be a particularly detrimental time to have a slug problem because they will destroy new growth in your herbaceous plants and eat holes through tender leaves.”
Steve Chilton, garden expert at LeisureBench, explained how to use eggshells as a repellent.
“Crush up some eggshells and place them around the edges of your plants and garden beds that you want to deter the slugs from," the expert said.
“The sharp edges on the eggshells should repel the slugs as they won’t like the spikes.
"The most important thing to remember with this is that you’ll need to continually replace the eggshells as eventually they’ll go soft which will stop deterring the slugs."
The gardener added: “Slugs will avoid the scent and feel of coffee grounds, so placing them around plants is a good way to deter slugs.
“As well as this, coffee grounds don’t have any negative impact on the majority of plants, and in fact work as a good compost ingredient.”
“As well as this, coffee grounds don’t have any negative impact on the majority of plants, and in fact work as a good compost ingredient.”
Chilton cautioned that while homemade remedies can banish slugs from the garden semi-permanently, you will need to continually upkeep these methods to permanently deter the molluscs.
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PEXELS“However, this is likely how it will be with slug deterring method,” he added.
The effectiveness of using homemade remedies has previously been thrown into question by researchers at McGill University.
They cited an experiment conducted by a group named ‘All About Slugs’, who put the hack to the challenge in a clever experiment.
After surrounding lettuce leaves - a favourite snack of snails - with crushed egg shells, the mollusc had no trouble barging through the barrier.
Instead, McGill researchers suggested deterring slugs with bait treated with iron phosphate.