Nah, you're not out of luck. Try coffee grounds around the plants.

I veer between hand picking, diatomaceous earth and (moderately) eco-friendly slug bait.
Bait and DE are very effective if kept dry, a board on bricks will help.
I can't imagine gardening without mulch and gastropods are the price I pay.

Mulching does provide a very good environment for slugs/snails to live and grow in so those of us that do mulch learn to cope. Diamotaceous Earth, Iron Phosphate baits, stale Beer in saucers, copper strips, cold caffienated coffee sprays are all tools that can help control them and the damage they do. Encouraging predators to take up residence in your garden will also help.
The cool, moist environment created by mulches is an idea habiatat for the slugs/snails.

I don't find mulch as much of a problem as plants that are too close together. If I get in and trim away places that snails like to hide, I find them and kill them. If you let them stay hidden you get more. They need to hide when the sun comes out, but if they can't hide they go away to find a place to hide. They can't bury themselves in mulch, I don't think so anyway.

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I'll have to try the coffee spray. Coffee grounds go stale so you end up adding coffee grounds over and over and I just can't seem to get the rate to add to match the rate of decay.

Thanks for that one.
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" They can't bury themselves in mulch, I don't think so anyway."

Slugs definitely bury themselves in mulch...

Off topic (kind of) but my 16-year-old just finished a biology project at school about snails. She had to collect a few from my garden to take to school. I offered to let her take one for everyone in the class but she said they had enough (darn).

Anyway, to add some trivia to your day these are some things I learned about snails. They are hermaphrodites and when they "meet up" both snails become pregnant. (Which explains why there are so darned many of the little fellas.) They give birth to baby snails through their cheeks.

I know, off topic. Just giving you some food for thought.

Allegedly, land snails are tasty with butter as "redneck escargot." I do NOT speak from experience.

Put up a few toad houses to encourage the slug eating friends to take up residence. I even put in a mini pond to encourage toad reproduction, and have toad house around the yard.

I have found that Chinese cabbage is a pretty good trap crop. They seem to prefer it to just about any other vegetable in the garden. Just intersperse Chinese cabbage at strategic points among your other plants, then go out and collect the slugs from the cabbages in the evening. Also, the eco-friendly slug baits do work reasonably well.

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Imperative

I always get plenty in beer traps.

I got caught in a beer trap myself once. I musta got that ring on my finger after I fell in there, and I've never been able to get it off since.

I have not found any snails or slugs in my coffee compost feed garden beds.
It could be the hot sun, which maybe why there are no earth worms in the garden.
Lots of life, just no snails,slugs & earth worms.
Cleaning up around the garden & keeping the compost pile on the far side of the garden helps.

I put up with slug for years and it finally got to the point I said that is enough,.
I used several types of slug killer put down heavily in fall and spring and now they are gone.

The main thing is when you use anything use enough to get the job done.

I used Natria snail/slug bait this year for the first time and LOVE the stuff! I was devastated when I lost 95% of my 125 foot garden in the first week. The snails and slugs ate the leaves off of all the baby plants, except the onions and radish plants.

It is pellets and so easy to spread. One teaspoon per 10 feet- something like that! It takes me less than 5 minutes to sprinkle it between the rows in my garden.

I got it at Lowes and highly recommend it. It is "organic-approved", I believe.

A friend of mine shared his slug defense trick with me recently: Put copper tape around the end of half a toilet paper tube, then place that around the transplant. I guess the seedlings need to be pretty small, and if you have a huge number it might not be workable, but he swears by it.

Hmm, interesting, I like it! They probably don't like the tiny electric potential, kinda like biting aluminum foil if you have fillings.

If you can't find copper tape (I don't know where to get it myself and I'm pretty knowledgeable about hardware), you could use pennies, or a piece of scrap copper tubing used for plumbing.

I wonder if Al foil would actually work too.

I can find no proof that copper works.

http://www.gardenmyths.com/how-to-get-rid-slugs-with-copper/

I would think that pennies and copper metal strips are not in the right state of a copper mixture to be effective. However, as this thread shows, we'll each try different things and if it works, stay with that. We won't totally get rid of them but we can reduce their population.

For me, I worked on getting rid of snail habitats such as large pieces of wood, stone, etc around the yard. Then I used Natria snail bait, which is a cheaper version of Sluggo, around the plants and in some areas of the landscaping. Finally, for a few weeks of spring, I go out in the evenings and another 2-3 hours later, and manually pick up any snails I see. Those go into a bucket with some soapy water, which helps to prevent them from crawling out the bucket.

By doing that, the later spring and summer months have a much reduced population of snails. I do this again in the fall to get rid of some more before the winter comes, where they will go into hiding and prepare the cycle all over again.

On a side note, there are warnings about using copper-based products when cleaning algae in a fish tank or pond, so regardless of our own observations, there does seem to be enough concern about copper products, which when dissolved with water, that can kill snails or other mollusks in water.

Thanks for the link jolj. Entirely possible this doesn't work at all, I was just speculating on why it might.

I am not sure I agree 100% with one point in the article, that there are components missing to produce an electric potential. A piece of steel, for example, can actually form an entire battery when left out to rust, through the action of bacteria. It's why pits form in some places and rust deposits on top of the surface in others. So I was not ready to assume there is nothing electrical going on here. All the same, if it doesn't work (as shown in the linked videos), it doesn't work, so my argument is purely academic. :-]

Does diatomaceous earth work on slugs? Like it does on critters with shells?