Getting rid of snails in the garden

Snails are a burden to the gardener. They reproduce quickly and they have few natural predators populating the garden. In any case, this includes the hedgehog, which should be protected if it lives in your garden. If you notice a proliferation of snails in your garden, you can use natural and chemical methods to combat them.

Fighting snails to protect the plants

The snail prefers to eat young green leaves. She is less interested in the flowers. For example, if you plant marigolds in tubs or flower beds in May and many snails populate your garden, you will not enjoy the flowers for long. The snails consume all of the leaves, causing the plant to die. An infestation of shrubs, on the other hand, does not always lead to the plants dying. But there, too, the leaves are eaten away, which means that the yields are either non-existent or very rare. Flowers are not or only very sparsely formed and the shrub is prevented from growing. You should therefore do something against the snails. Throughout the year, make sure that the animals cannot reproduce unhindered. If the infestation has already started and the plants are damaged, it is often too late and you can no longer save the summer flowers in particular. Shrubs may recover as the season progresses, but yields are either non-existent or very sparse.

Natural predators of snails

The snail has multiplied greatly in recent years. This particularly applies to the nudibranch, which appears in damp weather and literally populates the gardens in some regions. The problem is that while there are natural enemies. However, these rarely live in a kitchen or ornamental garden or they are just as undesirable there as the snail. This definitely includes moles. But also toads, chickens and ducks eat snails or they eat the eggs. Only they no longer run around in a modern garden. The only garden dweller is the hedgehog, but he alone cannot fight a plague of snails. Some songbirds are also interested in a snail for food. These include blackbirds, parents and crows. Seagulls and herons are helpful aides in combating snails when the yard is near a body of water.

Use home remedies or chemical agents to combat snails

If you want to permanently remove the snail from your garden, you should use remedies all year round. Although the animals move very slowly, they lay a large number of eggs. The young then hatch and populate your garden. If you do not want to collect a large number of dead animals from your garden, it is a good recommendation if you already destroy the eggs. You can use home remedies to fight off the snail plague, or you can use chemical agents. But these also affect your plants. If you value a biological garden, you should avoid chemical agents. There are various home remedies that bring good success and are also very easy to use. Since you have these funds available in your house anyway, you will not incur any additional costs.

Natural methods for snail control

You can choose between different methods if you want to fight the animals in a natural way. Decide on a variant that you can combine well with your gardening and that fits the size of your garden. The type of animals that have settled in your garden should also play a role in choosing the right remedy. Slugs have more natural predators than Roman snails, for example, which are better protected from predators by their shell. Decide individually or try a few remedies to find out which one works best against the snails.

collect snails

In principle, it is possible to collect individual animals and release them in the wild. However, this is only recommended if you have a very small garden or if the animals have settled in your tubs and balcony boxes. In larger gardens, the effort is too great. Still, collecting is the most natural way you can rid your garden of the animals.

Remove binges with eggs

If you don't want to start collecting the animals every year, you should remove the eggs in the fall. A single snail can lay up to 400 eggs. This explains why it is so easy for a plague to appear in your garden. A snail lays its eggs under large leaves or clusters of leaves in the fall. Edges, for example with lawn edging stones, or pits are also used for laying eggs. Snail eggs are large clusters of small white balls the size of a pinhead. They look milky and are therefore easy to recognize. You can prevent in a number of ways:

• do not leave planting holes
• remove leaves in the fall and layer them on a compost heap
• Remove bark mulch
• Loosen the soil in beds well
• Simply expose nests to dry out or be eaten by birds

If you distribute compost in the spring, you should make sure that it does not contain any snail nests. Otherwise you can get a new plague in the garden in this way.

Fight snail plague with coffee

The snail can easily be fought by sprinkling coffee grounds. If your family drinks a lot of coffee, this is the ideal prerequisite for effective snail control. The coffee grounds are also biodegradable and harm neither the soil nor the plants. If the snail eats the coffee grounds, it dies. In the event of a larger plague, however, you should be prepared to collect large quantities of dead animals. Sometimes birds also provide important assistance in removing dead animals

Salt as another effective home remedy for snail control

Salt is very cheap and available in every household. The home remedy is very useful for fighting snails because it is easy to use. Similar to coffee, the salt is very effective because the animals eat it and die. Your plants will not be affected. If you don't like coffee or only drink it very rarely, the home remedy is a very good alternative.

Use chemical agents

Chemicals are very effective because they contain a poison that kills the animals in a short time. The disadvantage, however, is that your plants will come into contact with it. If you value an organic garden, this way of controlling snails is not a good choice for you. However, it can happen that the plague is very large and you are no longer successful with the home remedies. In this case, the one-time use of a chemical snail control agent is recommended and also advisable, as there is no other way to get rid of the plague. Make sure you use the right dosage and try not to damage the plants too much. Sometimes a combination of chemical control and collection helps, for example if you do not want to pollute vegetable plants with chemicals.

Learn more about crop protection