Hooray! Success! I saved my lettuce from slugs!

Here's how I successfully set up my traps.

Yesterday we had a seriously intense rain storm come along, about 2” falling in 24 hours. It was dumping and about 60 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Experience has taught me that this is the weather that absolutely destroys my seedlings - because it causes slugs to become hyperactive.

If you’ve been on any gardening forums recently, you’ve likely seen the new bread dough method that’s been proposed by OSU. If you didn’t catch it, you can see more details about the method in this post here.

I’ve been kind of puttering with the method a bit in the garden, and not seeing a ton of positive results, but the slugs haven’t been quite as active as of lately.

So when the rain started dumping last night, I decided to test the method in earnest. I had an idea where slugs had been congregating, because one of my lettuces had gotten seriously munched the last few days.

This lettuce was looking pretty good until a couple of days ago.

The only trouble I’ve had so far with the bread dough method is figuring out how to place the bread dough in the garden. OSU did not touch on this at all, even when I asked via email as a follow-up question.

As bread dough is only an attractant, I’d need a way to dispatch the slugs. But keeping them from crawling away during the daylight is where I got a little stumped on how to do so.

I decided to try out big black nursery pots, with something placed over the top to keep the light out and the dough at the bottom of the pot. The thinking was that the holes in the bottom would allow the scent of the dough to escape and allow the slugs to crawl into the pot.

The bowl over the top shows you just how much it was raining yesterday!

Here’s the result:

7 fat slugs hiding underneath! These are bigger than they look in the photo.

The next setup I tried was 3 nursery pots, of various sizes, stacked up like this:

The dough was placed in the bottom layer, and I made sure that the holes were alternating to keep the light levels low (so they’d hide in there).

Here’s the result of this one:

Another half-dozen slugs. This photo does not do them justice - they were huge - especially that leopard slug. It was the biggest I’ve ever seen.

As I learned in the OSU web chat, the traps need to be placed every 3 feet, as there is very little draw distance. I had a few more traps that were placed out last night, but, the results not quite as impressive as these (but still had some).

I have noticed with my previous traps that something does tend to come along and eat the dough and leave. Probably rodents. The beer traps have had this problem in the past as well, with even slugs drinking the beer and moving on to my plants. I imagine this would happen with the slurry method as well, and the idea of the slurry doesn’t sound like it will be very effective.

This bread dough method is great but totally impractical to use all year. I’m going to report thumbs up for use during those heavy slug periods or when trying to get seedlings established. Also, I think a good use for this would be during the time strawberries are ripening.

Have you tried the bread dough method?

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Something pretty to get your mind away from the gross slug images:

Native mule’s ears have done particularly well in my garden. These 2 plants are roughly ten years old, and have about 20 buds on them.

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