Dear Esthomizzy,
Living in the same area as yourself, I have a similar problem, so can conmiserate! At this time of the year the slugs are dying out and the snails are looking for a place to hibernate, so it shouldn't be a problem. The best organic method would be to find where the snails hibernate and crush them! Be careful of any plants where slugs love to sleep on the leaves low down like day lilies and kniphofia. I found nematodes very good if used in springtime when plants begin to shoot, as it kills of the tiny slugs that live in the soil and your plants get a good start. But the effect only last for a number of weeks and then needs repeating. I have used beer traps but people say that it draws slugs from other gardens. Also you can try empty upturned gratefute halves. Anyway, good luck!

Its been a bad year.

squash em at night go on a snail massacre, and if you have( or have access to gaden friendly) kids get two of three and tell them there is a small prize for the one with the most snails you will be amazed at how many they find. i dont know how affective it is but it really is wonderful as they crunch under your feet!!
another thing you can do is encourage thrushes leave some big flat stones laying around the garden and wait for smashed shells.
In fact encouraging birds of all sorts into your garden will help
good luck with the battle
steve

Thanks for replies everyone. I'm glad at least that I'm not alone :) (not that that means I wish you any more slugs and snails in your gardens).

A year or so back there was an interesting article in the RHS magazine 'The Garden' about snails. Apparently the adults exude chemicals in their slime trails which inhibit the development of the baby snails. If you kill off the adults the babies stop coming across this chemical and start to grow. So you have to keep squashing them to have any impact on numbers. Just getting rid of the big ones only encourages the next generation. I have a permanent battle against them in both garden and allotment but lengthy search and destroy missions help. I also leave upside down pots around which I empty regularly and stamp on the contents.

Since I created a pond about 5 years ago and frogs became
resident, slugs and snails have become almost non-existant.
Prior to that I would go into the garden armed with a torch
and a brick at about 10 pm during spring and summer and could sometimes find between 20 to 40 snails

If you don't take the preferred organic route, it's worth noting that those turquoise-blue pellets only need to be put down at a spacing of one every two feet or so, the slugs will find them. As a paid gardener I'm always coming across small piles of them left by people who seem to think that they must kill slugs by some sort of avalanche effect. And don't leave saucers of beer around, drink it yourself, and in that way steeled for the fight, tell yourself I'm a killer too, and jump the little sods.

Not like this you mean!
{{gwi:2117306}}

I too have lots of slugs and snails, but I would never kill them. I feel they have a purpose in this world the same as every helpful creature we know of, in fact there is one plant that is only 'pollonized' by a slug.
I have a pond and so I am sure that the frogs have lovely suppers.(In fact the slugs and snails are now only found in my front garden and not in the back where the pond is) I don't put pellets down as I want my birds to be safe. Something I have found out is that they love apples. I had noticed that my apples I had put out for the blackbirds had been eaten in a wonderful round hole very neat and tidy which I hadn't expected knowing how they just peck at them. Then one night I went down the garden and came across two snails inside an apple eating it into the neat circular shape I had seen previously. My idea to keep your plants safe would be to put out a few pieces of apple round the base of the plants and see if they ate them instead. It's worth a try at least and I would rather they ate themselves to death than you killed them.
Alison

Hello Moriati, that isn't quite the avalanche effect is it, that's more like the War in the Far East effect, the I'm not wading through any more of this, is there anything else I can eat method of keeping them in their place. Did this happen in your garden?

Alison, don't let anyone put you off.

I can assure you one and all that the extreme anti-snail measures shown in the photo were nothing to do with me. I saw it on my travels and took a picture.

While i do use snail pellets occasionally, there is enough there to last me a year or more. The added salt is probably close to a years supply too.

Personally, I like standing on them.

Well - I have a pond in the garden with plenty of frogs but I also have millions of snails, though slugs are less of a problem. Has anyone actually seen a frog eat a snail? I have hand fed them worms and slugs but have not seen them eat snails. On the allotment(with a small pond and a few frogs) I have slugs and snails.

Another method I have used, organic, is to surround the plot,or mini plots with rigid plastic to make a wall approx 3 to 4 inches in hieght, dont leave any gaps. Everytime you find a black beetle pop it over the wall, it cant climb out so it will seek its food, ie: snail eggs, its amazing how many they lay just under the soil. Plastic lawn edging will do, but make sure its clear on the inside, nothing to help the beetles to escape.

Yeh, I've tried nematodes. Didn't do much. I think it was too dry in summer for them. I've encouraged frogs, now I have a garden over-run with frogs and slugs and snails as well. Hardly dare cut the lawn in case I chop a frog. The lawn is full of them, so I'm cutting the whole lawn with garden shears and being very careful now!

I haven't any advice I'm afraid, seeing that we, too, are overrun by slugs and snails. We've seen a lot of those 'giant' slugs, that years ago you'd only find out in the country. I 've also noticed that snails come over our 6-foot brick wall from our neighbour's garden during the night.

About ten years ago I planted a Silphium Perfoliatum (Cup plant). For years it remained pest-free. But in recent years the inner leaves are a mass of holes from snail damage. Snails used to come out just at night but, nowadays, they remain on the plants all the time. We also see slugs and snails roaming along the pavements during daytime as well!

Gardeners' create artificial habitats for them. I'm sure you won't find them in such densities elsewhere.

I don't know why we don't copy the French and eat the snails ! They lurve my basil grr. I trundle around the garden and chuck salt on them when I find them on the paving. I've seen them climb 6 ft to reach the vine on top of my pergola, too.