Gardeners slugging it out with pests

MAT-SU — It’s an all-out slug fest in Alaska gardens this year, and not just to see who can raise the biggest and best vegetables.

This year’s big winners aren’t sporting blue ribbons but a thick coat of mucus. Slugs have taken over many Alaska gardens and could be back for an encore in the spring if Alaska gardeners don’t give them their eviction notice before the terrestrial terrors burrow down into the ground for the winter.

It’s the weather causing the slug boom, says UAF Cooperative Extension Mat Su/Copper River District agriculture agent Steve Brown.

“They love 100 percent humidity and no wind, and that’s what we’ve had,” he said. Brown’s been deluged with calls and e-mails asking for help with the slimey hermaphrodites, even from Master Gardeners, from whom the Texas native often solicits advice on Alaska’s unique growing climate.

They are telling Brown, who has been here three years, that the lawn prawns have never been this bad.

Pat Ott of Wasilla is a Master Gardener. On Wednesday, she e-mailed Brown to ask him slugs’ place in the cycle of life, because she just can’t see their value.

“They just turn my stomach,” Ott confessed.

Brown’s answer? It’s a good way to occupy a 7-year-old with a box of salt.

While that was Brown’s method as a child, he said there are better ways of dealing with slugs, from commercial products like Sluggo, which contain iron phosphate — an organic solution considered safe around pets, humans and wildlife — to metaldehyde, which destroys the slug’s ability to produce mucus. And then there are other popular slug household controls like beer and yeast.

“The research is really mixed,” Brown said of the home-grown remedies.

Brown said other people use diatomaceous earth or crushed egg shells to keep away the shell-less mollusks.

“It’s rough and the little gastropods don’t like crawling over something rough,” Brown said. Others use copper strips on the frames of their raised beds. The slight electric current seems to keep the slugs at bay.

Ott says she has an effective way to control slugs in her flower gardens. She squishes them or occasionally uses scissors to cut them in half. She said on more than one evening she’s announced to her family, “I killed a hundred slugs again tonight.”

Others use solutions of salt or ammonia; some turn their chickens or ducks into the garden to feed on the unwelcome visitors, but Ott keeps it simple.

“I just go out and smush ‘em,” she said. But always with gloves. “I don’t know how anybody can touch them with their bare hands.”

Experts say if you get “slimed,” use a vinegar and water solution to clean it off.

There’s a shudder in Ott’s voice as she talks about her droves of unwanted visitors not just hiding under the blooms, but nibbling them to death. Her prize dahlias should have been purple with delicate white tips.

“They ate all the white off,” Ott said.

Those with vegetable gardens are faring no better, Brown said. The slugs are abrading holes in leaves and laying their pearly white eggs everywhere. Slugs can destroy foliage faster than the plant can grow.

It could be a problem again next year, Brown said, if gardeners don’t take precautions this fall.

“If you’ve got slugs this year, it’s important to go in there and till the soil up again to destroy the adults and the eggs that would overwinter,” he said.

Despite his efforts to help Alaska gardeners win the war against these close cousins to escargot, Brown is philosophical about them.

“The slugs are probably looking at us as the pest,” he said. “They’re upset we’re breaking up their gardens.”