The wet weather continuing through June, has resulted in slug bait being in short supply again. Slugs love this wet, cool weather and they have been eating their way through many gardens. Slug bait is an easy way to protect your precious plants, but it comes at a cost to another small mollusk, the common amber snail. Unlike their cousins the slugs, amber snails protect and clean plants only eating dead plant material and cleaning your plants in the process. 

Way back in the 1990’s when we expanded our garden center to the size that it is now, we had a huge slug problem. They would hide under every bench, slide into cracks in the pavement and even just sit inside the plant pots themselves. One year that was wet like this year we had a problem so bad that in one week the slugs ate roughly twenty three gallon pots of hostas. But a year or two later the slugs were all gone, and we haven’t had a large problem since, thanks in part to the amber snail. You see, because amber snails like dead plant material, when slugs detect amber snails in the area they leave thinking that the plant material must all be dead or dying. Slugs like only healthy green material not yellowing or brown leaves. So now our garden center is full of amber snails, cleaning dead plant material day and night. Also amber snails don’t leave a slimy trace behind them like slugs do. If you pick one up and put it in your hand, you can watch it crawl across your hand and your hand does not feel slimy afterwards. 

I tell all my customers that these are the good guys that you want in your garden. Unfortunately they can be collateral damage by slug bait as well, even the organic baits. So if you decide to get some slug bait just know that it will affect the amber snail population as well. 

Amber snails are very prolific and are quite common almost everywhere so the population overall is not under stress by any means. One method for killing slugs that won’t hurt the snails is to invite your slugs to the local pub. Pour them a pint and let them drown their sorrows away or at least just drown. Slugs are attracted to beer, whereas the amber snails are not. The only problem with that is beside wasting a good beer, you need to put down many cups all over where you think the slugs are coming from or going to. Slug bait is easy to scatter over a large area so that slugs find it quickly, as a cup or two of beer could take them quite a while to find.

  A couple other beneficial insects to the garden are ladybugs and ants. Most people know that ladybugs eat bad bugs like aphids, whiteflies, but they don’t know about the benefit of ants. Like ladybugs, ants too eat aphids and other harmful insects, but they do something else too. 

In the case of garden peonies, you want to see ants climbing all over your flower buds for a couple of reasons. First is to protect the stems against sap sucking insects like aphids and second is to lick the sticky nectar off the top of the flower bud so that the flower can open to its fullest extent. So if you see ants on your peonies don’t worry, unless your peonies are in a cut flower arrangement in your kitchen.