A note for homeowners and a note for housewives - everything about slugs in the house, everything about methods for eliminating them. How to get rid of slugs in a private house and in urban housing, the best methods and means. About modern chemical protection products, about traps and bait, about home and folk tricks. And - about why slugs settle in the house, and how to prevent their appearance.
The appearance of slugs and where they come from in the house
Slugs are gastropods that have lost their shells during evolution. They can be found in any region of the planet with a mild, humid climate. The body of slugs is wrinkled. It can have a color from yellow-white to light gray. There may also be black spots or longitudinal stripes on the body of mollusks. There are 4 processes on the head. They are shaped like small horns.
Slugs live in gardens, fields, and vegetable gardens, but they can also get into the house. Thanks to their flexible body, capable of taking any shape, mollusks can penetrate the narrowest crevices. If there are cracks in the foundation of the house, this is a guarantee that new disgusting-looking residents will soon appear inside the house.
Since the highest humidity in the house is in the bathroom and toilet, you can most often see slugs in these rooms. Therefore, in order not to later look for where slugs entered the house from, if they are identified on the site, it is necessary to block their passage into the house and other buildings in advance.
In the house
What do they not like and what are they afraid of?
Slugs do not tolerate direct sunlight, dryness and elevated temperatures. Dry soil is the scourge of slugs, which is why morning watering is recommended rather than evening watering when they start eating.
If the soil is covered with something unsuitable for crawling - sharp gravel, ash, straw or needles - it is difficult for them to move.
Slugs, having an excellent sense of smell, “cannot stand” some plants:
- onion;
- garlic;
- sage;
- oregano;
- watercress;
- geranium;
- basil;
- white clover;
- caraway;
- mustard.
Damage from slugs
Slugs are creatures that can cause quite significant harm to the household. If they appear in the house, indoor plants will suffer: slugs damage their stems and eat leaves.
Garden and field crops suffer in the same way from the pest. Mollusks damage sown seeds, seedlings, young shoots, parts of root crops protruding from the soil, leaves, stems of the following plant species:
- cabbage;
- cucumbers;
- tomatoes;
- beans and peas;
- strawberries;
- rye, winter wheat, barley, oats;
- potatoes and others.
Moreover, domestic slugs can carry various diseases - late blight, downy mildew, cabbage blotch, fungi, etc.
If shellfish manage to penetrate the cellar, some of the vegetables stored there will be spoiled. At the same time, most of the fruits will be unsuitable for use not from damage, but from decay, which occurs in those places where slugs have crawled.
Important ! Slugs can transmit parasitic diseases; they are intermediate and definitive hosts of various types of helminths.
Several recommendations for plant protection
Cornmeal poured into a trap
Slugs feed on tender leaves, making it more difficult for them to get to tied plants. Tomatoes, pumpkins and legumes tied to a support will become inaccessible to pests, given that their stems are rough and unpleasant for pests.
It is better to cover young sprouts with half a plastic bottle or a film cover - this will make them inaccessible to slugs.
An excellent bait is cornmeal poured into a trap.
The peel of half a grapefruit can be a kind of bait: if you put it on a ridge with the cut side down, making a small “entrance” for pests, they will be attracted by the smell, and then they are collected and destroyed.
Ways to fight
You can’t delay killing slugs: they lay up to 500 eggs at a time, from which new pests appear after 2-3 weeks. After just 45 days, the young slugs will be able to lay their own eggs.
Pests can be destroyed in different ways - using chemicals, traditional methods, and physical elimination. How to deal with them - everyone decides for themselves based on their capabilities, the number of slugs in the house, on the site and other conditions.
But before you start exterminating slugs, you need to block the pests’ access to the inside of the house. To do this, you need to carefully inspect the floors, walls, especially their lower part and seal all the cracks.
Harm
Manual collection
It is best to collect slugs in the house by hand. To do this, it is enough to identify the place where they are hiding. The easiest way to do this is to follow the trail left by the mollusk.
If slugs are based under the floor, penetrating through existing cracks, you need to arrange a convenient entry point for them where it is needed so that they can be easily collected. To do this, you can leave a damp cloth on the floor. To avoid damaging wooden floors, place a piece of plastic film or a regular bag under a wet cloth.
Collected pests must be destroyed, for example, with boiling water.
Catching with baits
The fight against slugs will be more successful if you use various traps. The simplest of them is the same wet rag, but you need to soak it in beer: as it turns out, slugs really like its smell.
They are not averse to eating citrus fruits. To make a trap, you need to cut an orange, tangerine, grapefruit in half and place the halves where the mollusks live. It is necessary to place halves of the fruit with the cut side up so that slugs can crawl into it, but they will not be able to get out.
Getting rid of pests in an apartment or house is not at all difficult if you know what and how to do.
Folk remedies
There are many simple means with which you can remove mollusks, for example, such as:
- Ammonia , vinegar. The specific smell of these liquids repels slugs. Accordingly, you need to wet pieces of cloth or cotton wool with one of the selected liquids and place them in those places in the house where mollusks live.
- Insoluble coffee, salt, mustard. It is necessary to pour one of the substances onto a sheet of paper and place it in the place where there are traces of slugs on the floor, near the wall.
- Barrier device. The body of slugs is very delicate, so they can be scared away by making an obstacle out of lime, sawdust, coarse sand, crushed eggshells, and ash. As an option, you can create a barrier from pine needles. Pine or spruce needles will not only prevent slugs from entering a house or outbuilding, but also repel them with their smell.
On a note . Folk remedies generally do not destroy slugs, but repel them, so to completely eliminate the pest from your area, you will need to use chemicals.
Insoluble coffee
Chemicals
The most effective way to get rid of shellfish is to use sulfur bombs. Unfortunately, fumigation with this type of product is dangerous for people, animals, and birds.
Important ! Before use, be sure to study the instructions on how to properly use the drug in order to get rid of slugs in the house and not cause harm to anyone.
Before fumigation, it is necessary to seal all the cracks in the cellar, remove vegetables and other preparations. Place a metal sheet on the floor, place a checker on it and set it on fire. Depending on the size of the room, you will need from 1 to 4 checkers.
You must first complete all the preparatory work, and only then quickly light the wicks on all the checkers and immediately leave the room, tightly closing the door or hatch. After 72 hours, the cellar must be well ventilated. If the cellar is located under the house, it is best to leave the home for 3 days while the treatment takes place.
You can use a more gentle way to remove slugs from your home without using such radical means as a smoke bomb. We are talking about dusting the premises with bleach mixed with chalk. Prepare the room as in the previous case. Leave the mixture for a day, and then remove the dead mollusks and sweep out the remains of the mixture.
We'll sweep it up, we'll take it out... We'll live on a bare planet.
Articles by eminent agronomists and honored farmers would further discuss how and what is the best way to lime a slug. But I will not discuss the issues of mass killing of slugs. I myself am too lazy for energetic military measures, and I consider fussing for every inch of land free from pests on a scale of six to fifteen to thirty acres to be pointless. Besides, I don’t feel the right to deprive other creatures of life just because I wanted to admire some vegetation right here and now, and they prevented it. As long as we are not talking about cultivating the land for our daily bread, there is no point in fighting what nature itself has come up with. As for what chemists and biologists came up with, let them figure it out themselves.
Red roadside slug and the hand of a 9-year-old child.
Prevention measures
Slugs are unpleasant neighbors that hardly anyone would like to see on their property or in their house. Therefore, it is necessary to take appropriate measures in advance to protect your home from pests:
- All places where slugs can settle should be cleaned regularly.
- Before you start collecting potatoes and other vegetables, prepare the cellar - clean it and dry it.
- Every year, whitewash the ceilings and walls of the cellar, basement, and other utility rooms with high humidity.
Of course, it is impossible to get rid of slugs forever using preventive measures, therefore, as soon as they appear on the site or in the house, you must immediately begin to destroy them.
Video: How to deal with woodlice in an apartment
To prevent the appearance of mollusks in the cellar, you can use lime pollination, avoid high humidity in the room, and ventilate more often.
Reviews
miltonita
https://dv0r.ru/forum/index.php?topic=2742.0
...My parents bought a house with a plot in the Oregburg region four years ago. The first year of harvest and almost all of my mother’s flower plants were eaten by slugs and snails of all sorts... But my mother had a dream... Her own pond on the property. For a long time she persuaded the men of our family... Then one fine day she picked up a shovel and went out into the garden and started digging. Halfway through the first cubic meter, the men felt ashamed... And we have a lot of men in our family. My mother has two sons-in-law, a husband and four grandchildren (three of them are already suitable for digging)... In general, they dug a pond, covered it with film, planted plants from the nearest reservoir... The first to come to the pond were the toads. They liked my mother’s pond so much that they laid so many eggs there that we were tired of catching them... Simultaneously with the arrival of the toads, almost all the snails and slugs disappeared on the site. Now the pond has long had its own ecosystem... Swallows fly so funny and drink water from it - on the fly... Toads gather at the pond in the evenings, have sex and lay eggs, sing songs (sing beautifully...), All kinds of water striders run... Water lilies are blooming... Beauty. And there are so many slugs and snails that my child brought one from the neighbor’s garden this summer and was surprised that snails actually live here... I’m not writing this to say that you should pick up shovels and dig ponds... But maybe it’s just worth a try attract their natural enemies to your area... Snails and slugs, besides toads and birds, probably also have other enemies...
I’m not writing this to say that you should pick up shovels and dig ponds... But maybe you should just try to attract their natural enemies to your area... Snails and slugs, besides toads and birds, probably also have other enemies...
Razumeeva
https://dv0r.ru/forum/index.php?topic=2742.0
When slugs appear (and they reproduce quickly), attract hedgehogs, surround them with “water barriers”, etc. - ... well, it’s clear that the author of the article, whose information Pavel shares with us, has “many methods,” but really what to do. They drink beer, but in the morning the glasses are empty. I collected it manually for 3 nights - I was terribly tired. About tweezers - nonsense. They climb out at night. In one hand, a flashlight, a jar of salt water on the ground. Collect with your free hand... I was lucky - I sprinkled Ulicide Eco (not chemicals) - they disappeared very quickly. And it’s scary to sprinkle chemicals, although they offer it. Eco = non-chemical.
Kate
