==>>>> well.. perhaps if you tried the VERY ACTIVE hosta forum.. you would find out all about 10% vinegar or ammonia sprays to dealing with such.. including full fall cleanup ...

including ... i believe. a FAQ on such ...

its a year long battle....

ken

Beer definitely works, but you may end up attracting every snail/slug in the vicinity. Fill a small tin (tuna cans work fine) with cheap beer and bury it near ground level (burt then fill, actually). The slugs crawl in an drown. Toss them in the morning.

I have also used the slug/snail bait that is safe for pets.

Good luck. Nothing worse than a chewed- up hosta.

Oh and yes, do join everyone at the Hosta Forum. It can be a dangerous path leading to addiction, but wow, it is so worth it!

I put a light sprinkle around each and every seedling, if I want to be assured to see them grow up, because otherwise slugs can wipe them out in an evening.

For the hostas and other larger plants that are slug favorites, I use the ammonia solution in a spray bottle, that was recommended on the Hosta forum. Works great!

So Ken does white vinegar solution work equally well as the ammonia?

And here I thought I lived in the slug capitol of the world ;) I bait about 11 months out of 12 (sometimes skipping January) and can keep damage to a minimum. Commercial slug bait in the rain resistant pellets, combined with some night time flashlight forays armed with a spray bottle of household ammonia and water mix....I can keep control, but never eliminate them. They would laugh at eggshells, coffee grounds, copper tape, any of the more innovative suggestions, and I won't deal with the mess of beer traps, which the deer would probably just drink from anyway.

We have a few slugs, but they really aren't that big a deal. Sometimes I remember to put out slug bait and if I do, my few hostas survive the summer with almost no damage. If I don't remember, they get chomped to some degree, but not enough to bother me. Usually the damage doesn't occur until mid-summer and by them I don't care that much about the hosta. Nothing else seems bothered by the slugs. To my knowledge the only snails we have are like maybe a 1/4 inch. I've never seen one. I've only read about them.

I've always wondered how you folks over there deal with these nasties. It seems like a nightmare situation.

Kevin

Could that be because of the 'year long battle.... '

Like Kevin, it looks as though I lucked out in the location, location, location equation since even though I have more than 50 hostas (the bulk of which are 'designer' hostas--i.e., named cultivars), serving various purposes throughout the garden, a very few are bothered and I always sprinkle crushed egg shells around the plants as they emerge in spring. That seems to eliminate the problem, or at least it has the past 8 years.

I have one bed in particular... well, two actually... that are pretty much hosta beds--one in full shade and the other under my crabapple tree so that's part-shade. For some reason the plants in the full shade bed have grown considerably larger this year than in past years which bugs me because I only allotted them a certain amount of space & they aren't supposed to grow that large.

Here's the full shade bed north of my garage. Hosta bed is to the right of the path.

Don't let Ken see this, but I don't actually mind that much not being able to grow lots of Hosta. I've looked at the Hosta forum and it seems like a form of OCD rather than gardening ;-) I just don't like the look of a garden full of one type of plant, however many nuances of shape, size and variegation.

What does really annoy me is slugs and snailsr habit of eating of the spring bulb flowers just as they are about to open, of eating the emerging clematis shoots, of then climbing the vines to eat the flowers and of mowing down emerging vegetables on the allotment.

Here's another horror picture. The harvest of beans and snails took 5 minutes. The snails climb the bean poles and snooze there until night when they come down and eat anything juicy.

Kevin

The slugs I can deal with more easily. They respond to bait very well and I also do twilight forays with the salt shaker. OTOH, the snails are far more acrobatic, climbing to places the slugs only dream of, devour a much wider range of plants and scoff at bait. And they are much better at hiding.

Your collection of snails looks all too familiar :-) I find they can be pitched pretty nicely, though - I heave them into the road or my neighbor's gravel driveway. Can't do that as handily with slugs :-(

ps. you should see what the buggers did overnight to my purple brugmansia that was the centerpiece of a seasonal container planting. It looks like swiss cheese and the flowerbuds have been devoured!!

I don't buy the Sluggo with spinosad added because spinosad, altho they say it's organic, kills all kinds of soil critters.

Plain Sluggo works.

BTW, Astrantia is not a slug/snail favourite but it isn't completely immune, at least not in my garden.

Ferns are wonderful, being gastropod-proof. Might put some pics on Aachenelf's fern post later.

Some people go as far using a battery to create a mini electric fence on containers to try them.