What do I do in February so that there are no Slugs on the site in the summer. I share my experience

I have not had any special problems with these pests on the site before. Unless they ate the sides of individual berries in strawberries. I was not particularly worried about this, the blackbirds pecked more.

You get up early, harvest in the morning chill before all these robbers harvest and the strawberries ripen for yourself further, until the evening coolness.

Three years ago, we started an invasion of gastropods, and while walking we met individuals of some gigantic size. Our dog even shied away from them, mistaking these creatures for snakes. I began to haunt these mollusks back in February, having connected the whole family to this.

In the palace, on the porch

I mentioned thrushes, but this is a weak ally in the fight against slugs. Starlings are another matter, this bird is omnivorous, like the thrush, but snails and other mollusks are just its specialization.

Therefore, my men first of all put together a couple of birdhouses and attached them, one to the linden, the other, on the contrary, to the birch. They did not stop there and made a couple of titmouses.

Remember how titmice peck at fat outside the window in winter? This is from hunger. They are notorious predators and in summer slugs are just a tasty lunch for them, and they do not look at strawberries or blackberries at all.

We placed houses for these birds at the other end of the site. Well, they also threw a couple of fragments of cement pipes along the fence, hammering one end of them with some rags. This is for the wagtails.

Ideally, of course, you can have chickens. These will clean the area from all kinds of living creatures to zero, but this is an extreme option. Who will then rid me of the chickens?

Oh, frost, frost

Slugs die after they lay their eggs in the fall. If in the fall they did not cope with this task, then they hibernate and lay eggs in the spring. It is believed that the eggs of these mollusks are very frost-resistant, but no one has canceled the laws of physics.

Pests arrange their masonry in wet ground under various shelters - scraps of covering material, boards, logs, heaps of foliage, etc.

If you put in order the site in the fall, removing all the garbage, then it is enough in certain places scatter several bushes of roofing material and you do not have to look for a future accumulation of young growth of these gastropods.

On a beautiful frosty day, your men with a crowbar, sledgehammers and shovels, clear and pick out these pieces of roofing material from snow and dig up the ground under it to a depth of five centimeters.

The ground, of course, is frozen, but a crowbar will come in handy here, and you can break clods with a sledgehammer. All this land remains uncovered with snow for the entire frosty period. A couple of days in the cold perfectly clean the soil from the eggs of the slugs that lived on your site.

Finally, I ask my men to sprinkle the crushed earth with ash from the stove. Ash lowers the acidity of the soil, and slugs do not like it. There is no one to creep out there, and the quality of the soil on the site is gradually improving.

What's in the bottom line

As a result, I got:

· Slugs don't pester me. I crush them sometimes, but these are obviously mature individuals that have been nailed;

· Even small black caterpillars have disappeared on the site, which are eating nettles on the compost heap;

Feathered residents delight me endlessly, and this is another story:

· Cabbage and lettuce give a stable harvest;

· No chemistry was required.

I performed this entire procedure this February as well. Hopefully this winter, which is much colder than previous winters, will reduce the number of slugs in the area.