How to Get Rid of Slugs & Snails Around the Yard and Garden

Slugs and snails can make a meal of your plants in a heartbeat. Their slime trails are all that is left of their presence, making prevention and control challenging.

I’m going to share the top four reasons you have them in your yard, around your house, or in your garden, and how to get rid of slugs and snails for good with natural prevention strategies. Let’s go!

The Struggle Is Real

There is an escalating struggle between slugs and growers who employ permaculture practices, such as no-till gardening and cover cropping. I get messages in my inbox all the time saying, “Luke, slugs are taking out my tomatoes faster than I can grow them! What am I doing wrong?”

General Patton once said that one first needs to understand the enemy in order to properly fight them. If you are ready to wage war against the slugs and snails invading your yard or garden, I recommend taking the time to understand them first.

Biology of Slugs & Snails 

Slugs and snails are not insects or worms. They are soft-bodied gastropods (a class of mollusks) that have a slimy coating, which keeps them hydrated, facilitates their movement, and protects them from predators.

The slug life cycle includes three stages: eggs, juveniles, and adults. Slugs and most snails are hermaphroditic, meaning that they are born with both female and male reproductive parts. 

After mating, both slugs can lay a clutch of 10 to 50 eggs (or approximately 500 eggs per slug per year). This is why favorable conditions can cause populations to seemingly explode!

Understanding Slug And Snail Behavior

Most slugs and snails like darkness, and they like moisture; they require these two conditions to thrive. They are voracious, little nocturnal feeders that emerge at night when they have very few predators. 

During the daytime, they prefer to stay hidden in the shadows underneath objects like logs, rocks, debris, and planters or in areas of dense foliage that creates a ground cover. Sometimes they may even burrow into the topsoil.

Slugs can feed on fungi, mushrooms, decomposing material, fruits and vegetables, flowers, or live plants. Herbivorous snails have a similar diet, feeding on a wide array of plants. They can really be a problem when you are growing lettuce, growing corn, cabbage, beans, strawberries, peas, dahlias, ornamentals, and many other crops.

Identifying Slug & Snail Damage 

You may see slugs and snails on your plants if you are out early in the morning or at dusk, or you may never see them. Look for these signs of damage:

• Slime Trails - You may notice tell-tale glistening slime trails on foliage, walkways, or patios. The residual mucus is a valuable clue that you have slugs or snails!

• Holes in Leaves - Slugs and snails prefer to eat seedlings and tender new leaves, but they also consume seeds, roots, and stems. They make ragged, irregular holes in plant leaves and flowers. 

• Scraped Leaves - Sometimes, slugs will first scrape leaves of plants, especially on corn, before peppering the leaves with holes.

• Hollowed-Out Seeds - Slugs will hollow out certain types of seeds and kill them. 

Slug damage can resemble the damage caused by earwigs, caterpillars, tomato hornworms, and other chewing insects, but none of those pests will leave slime trails. The good news is that slugs and snails are easy to control!

Natural Prevention Methods

Whether you have slugs or snails, the prevention and treatment methods are exactly the same. Instead of using band-aid control measures, I would rather teach you how to keep them out of your garden and prevent them in the long run! 

The best prevention strategy and the secret to controlling them in the long run is to remove their habitat! Follow these four tips to prevent slug and snail pressure:

• Use Fine Mulch - Certain types of mulch, like leaf litter or plastic mulch, can create a dark, damp environment near a food source (your plants), which is perfect for snails and slugs. Instead, use a finely shredded wood mulch that dries out on top and doesn’t create large, moist, shaded areas of soil near your plants.

• Remove Lower Plant Foliage - It is essential to keep plant foliage pruned away that touches the soil to reduce pests such as slugs and picnic beetles. This includes pruning tomato plants, cabbages, potatoes, squash, cucumbers—any low-hanging leaves that create slug habitat. Pro-Tip: Growing a vertical garden helps keep plants off the ground, greatly reducing the chance of slugs and snails. 

• Don’t Overwater - Don’t overwater and allow your plants to dry out between waterings! Excessive moisture can lead to root rot, garden mushrooms, and a damp habitat that invites slugs and snails. 

• Environmental Conditions - If you have environmental conditions that host slugs and snails in close proximity to your home or garden (like an orchard, forest, or piles of leaf litter or other debris) remove them if possible! Slugs can crawl 25 feet per hour in damp conditions, meaning, even though they don’t have any legs, they can travel to your plants overnight. And they just might decide to stay and live where their food is. 

How to Get Rid of Slugs and Snails

If you already have slugs or snails in your garden and they are a problem, first use the prevention and control methods listed above for best results! You probably hear about people using other methods and home remedies to get rid of slugs, so let’s talk about those as well.

Here is a list of common slug and snail control methods, some being more effective than others:

• Sand - The gritty texture of sand, crushed eggshells, or horticultural grit makes an uncomfortable surface for slugs and snails to crawl across. A good barrier of sand can work as a deterrent, but you have to put a lot of sand down in your garden for it to be effective. 

• Diatomaceous Earth - A barrier of diatomaceous earth works as a deterrent much like sand because its sharp, jagged edges lacerate the soft-bodied slugs and snails. As an additional boon, it can also kill slugs by dehydrating them. (Here is more information on using diatomaceous earth for pest control.)

• Copper Wire - Using copper wire, copper tape, or copper mesh around your plants can help, but this method tends to be expensive, and it is not foolproof. I would not recommend this method.

• Sluggo - Sluggo is an organic bait used to control snails and slugs. I’ve used it before, just remember to put it AWAY from your home and garden. The bait is an attractant, so I don’t recommend putting it in your garden. The bait might attract them and then they find your cabbages much more appealing!

• Beer Traps - Beer traps are commonly used to get rid of slugs and snails. While they do work, I don’t really recommend using them because they also kill many other beneficial insects.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and learned something new. Continue to take your DIY pest prevention to the next level by using natural strategies to eliminate squash bugs, effective methods for preventing the tomato hornworm, and safe ways to get rid of wasps in the garden.