Pigs eat slugs. They roll them around in their mouth to get the slime off before swallowing them. I'll take slugs over pigs any day. My neighbor's pigs got loose one time from their enclosure and made it to my garden through a barbed wire fence meant for cows and horses. They walked around my nursery beds with 4 inch seedlings with their snout about 4 inches in the dirt. What a mess! I chased the pigs back home and helped my neighbor repair the pig pen. He no longer has pigs, just cows. Mike

yeah a lot of the methods only partly work some of the time. so its like...lessening the damage, not completely eliminating it. one thing that does work - seaweed. only, unfortunately, it is very salty and the salts arent that great for getting in your soil, but its those very salts that the slugs hate. partially rinsed off theres still lots of salt on the seaweed, and it is a good amendment once it breaks down and releases minerals and nutrients.... another thing is placing boards around the garden. the slugs love these, and use them to hide underneath...they munch your plants at night (f*@#ers!!!!) and then when the sun comes up they go to sleep under the boards, usually stuck upsidedown to the bottom. so then every day if you go out and lift up the boards, you can get a couple + off each board on a daily basis. beer traps also work.

I've been battling snails for years! They de-head and kill all my seedlings grown from seed. I tried Sluggo and other products like it and didn't like it's side effects on my plants. The plants tend to turn VERY dark green and get crisper and wrinkled. It doesn't kill the plants, just mutates them for a few weeks before they recover and grow normal again. I wonder if it's the iron in the sluggo product? Last year, I tried several holistic methods and had success with a couple. They sell little tiny shot-glass sized plastic cups and I buried them to the rim and filled with beer. I bought beer and also made my own mash with yeast, water and honey. The store-bought beer worked pretty well but some plants were still being chewed off. I tried surrounding the seedling stems with sand paper and that worked until it rained. The grit washed off the sand paper quickly. I tried putting leaves from mint plants surrounding each seedling stem. I sprinkled garlic and cayenne pepper on the ground. Those 3 things did not work at all. But placing pennies vertically around each stem worked 100%. The pennies placed horizontally worked too, until it rained and soil washed over the copper and the snails crossed the barrier. It took 3 or 4 pennies placed vertically in a square around each stem to ensure the seedling survived. My garden is 150 feet long and it will be annoying as all get out, but I will be planting pennies this year, along with each plant. I'll use Sluggo outside the garden, a couple feet away from the perimeter.

My solution is not natural at all, but it works literally overnight. Ammonium sulfate is a cheap fertilizer available at all garden stores. It looks like rock salt and, as far as snails and slugs are concerned, it works like rock salt. As soon as they try to move and hit that salt, they foam up and die. We used to have snails and slugs in the ivy, but one application of AS and they were gone, again, overnight. 25 years later we still had no snails/slugs.