How to manage slugs without insecticides

Slugs -- you'll find them in every garden at some point or another.  The trick is to not let your garden be overrun by them. The following guidelines offer natural ways to control slug populations, without insecticides.

Beth Smerek, a bedding plant specialist at a Boulder, Colorado, nursery, advises that most insects are beneficial or neutral to your plants, and when beneficial insects (such as those that eat pests) are killed, a dependency on chemicals is created.

Before killing everything that moves the minute you notice some holes in the leaves, bring an affected leaf or picture of the problem to a reputable garden centre and find out what is wrong. Then you can choose the treatment that will attack that problem specifically.

It's safer to use chemical treatments on indoor plants, because the indoor environment is completely artificial and contained, and thus the chemicals won't affect creatures other than the target pests.

You can buy expensive and toxic slug repellents, but natural methods are cheaper and just as effective. Slugs, it turns out, have a fatal vice: they like beer too much.

• Fill an empty tuna or cat-food can with beer and bury it in your garden soil up to its rim. Overnight, slugs will move into the beer and drown. You can throw out the entire can in the morning and replace it with a fresh batch.
• Not a beer drinker? Slugs hate coffee — or at least caffeine — just as much as they like beer. Researchers have found that a solution of one percent to two percent caffeine will kill slugs. That's much more than the average cup of coffee contains, but coffee still might act as a deterrent.
• Spray foliage with the brew or sprinkle the grounds around your plants. (Many coffee shops give away grounds to gardeners for free.) If nothing else, coffee grounds make a good addition to the soil, especially for plants that like acidic soils.

If you're not squeamish, you can deal with slugs you spot in the garden by hand.

• Sprinkling salt on the critters will kill them, and you can throw them into the trash.
• Or you can put a board or two on the garden soil, and slugs and snails will take shelter in the damp shade beneath them.
• Pick up the boards and scrape the creatures into the trash.
• To make your garden less inviting to slugs and snails, always water it in the morning. If the soil is dry at night, the critters will be less active.