“You don’t have a snail problem. You have a duck deficiency”. That was Bill Mollison’s reply to a gardener struggling with gastropods.
I am a bird watcher. I keep a supply of birdseed around my deck, and there is always a good show provided. I even enjoy the thieving squirrels who don’t seem to know these seeds are for the birds. I was thinking about how close my bird feeder is to the Kitchen Garden, and I recalled the above passage.
When spring began last year, the Kitchen Garden where I was building the soil using the sheet mulching method was not fully baked. Slugs took most of the young things I planted from seed or sprouts. They were there to turn the cardboard into the dirt, so I felt I needed to be patient and just let them be to do their job.
Meanwhile, despite my grand offering on the deck, I noticed a lot of avian activity in the Kitchen Garden. By late summer, there was hardly a slug to be found.
Here’s one they missed!
I now provide birdseed in the Kitchen Garden to attract my slug-eating allies. Yes, I might lose a sprout or two, but a carefully placed empty jelly jar can protect against their errant plunder until plantings become established.
The bird patrol did an excellent job for me, and they are invited back for this season and many more to come.