The advice on slug and snail control has
changed a lot over the last few years, and some of it is really quite contradictory. So
one way through that is to choose slug resistant plants, and plant more of those in your garden.
It's Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel and blog, and I've come to
talk to a real plant expert, Stephen Ryan of The Horti-Culturalists channel, where they really
talk all about plants, about where they come from, the sort of specialist ways of choosing the
right plants, getting something a little bit unusual. And of course the other thing is, is that
Steven's based in Australia, I'm based in the UK, and I know a lot of you are based around the
world, such as North America, southern Africa, and Northern Europe. So do we all have the same
slug resistant plants? Stephen will tell me. Before we get on to the slug resistant plants,
we'll cover where we are with slug and snail control, and why it's a bit contradictory. So
Steve, in terms of snug and snail control in the UK, we now don't have metaldehyde based slug
pellets, and those are the ones that damaged our wildlife. Our slug pellets are based on ferric
phosphate, and in fact they don't damage wildlife, but quite a few people say they are not good for
the soil. So the general idea that we don't use slug pellets, or that if we use them we use them
very sparingly, and only when plants are young, just to get them to be big enough, that a bit
of slugs and snail damage doesn't matter. And then the other thing we're being told, which is
quite contradictory in a way, is that we need to have a wildlife friendly garden. Which means that
we have piles of leaves and twigs in one corner, we grow our grass a little bit longer, we
are not too tidy, we leave things around, and then that encourages the beetles and the
birds which will then eat the slugs and snails. However of course if you're running a vegetable
garden, you'll be told to keep everything very tidy because those little habitats for the
beetles and birds are also good habitats for the slugs. So actually if you're going to be a
little bit untidy in your garden, you might get more slugs and snails. So you've got a nursery
as well, as The Horti-Culturalists channel, and you've got plants in there like dahlias
and cannas that do get eaten by slugs. So before we get on to slug resistant plants, how do
you deal with these slightly contradictory issues? Well of course in a nursery, you do try and keep
a nursery reasonably tidy, but that doesn't mean you don't create lots of habitats for slugs and
snails, because you've got all these pots sitting next to each other. So in fact it's the perfect
place for slugs and snails to live. And in fact you can pick up the average pot in my nursery, and
lo and behold you'll find a slug living underneath it. So it creates quite good habitat for slugs
and snails. So certainly from the perspective of plants that are prone to slug and snail attack, I
tend to grow them particularly as young plants up on shelves. So I keep them out of the way of slugs
and snails as much as possible. I've learned the bitter lesson of losing some very rare seedlings
that are particularly tasty to slugs and snails, because I didn't put them up. So I tend to do that
a fair bit. I have to say a lot of my plant range now seems not to be particularly prone to attack.
So a lot of the plants I'm growing are more woody shrubs and trees, which of course are less likely
to be attacked by slugs and snails. And I have to say also in Australia we can still get most
of the sort of slug and snail killers that you no longer can get in in England, and people still
use them. I don't usually use them in the nursery myself. So I do try and make sure my range is
reasonably hardy and can cope a little bit. And of course we're working with basically the
same slugs and snails that you have in England, because they've migrated out here with us, and
so in fact you can't really see them as wildlife things, they're actually pests because they're
not native. And we don't have hedgehogs or thrushes or any of those other animals that rely
on things like slugs and snails. So in fact we look at it slightly differently here and will
I think for a long time. I think the point you make about putting something high up on a shelf
is interesting, because I spoke to the senior wildlife specialist Helen Bostock at the RHS about
this, and they've done tests about barrier methods of slug and snail control, and they found that
on the whole the barrier methods - that's the horticultural grit, the copper tape, the wool
pellets, coffee grounds, all that sort of thing which you put round the plant to stop the snugs
and snails going over it - but the awful thing is they don't work so well. All the tests showed
they didn't work so well, because the slugs can go under. If I was using something say like the
copper, I wouldn't use a copper ring, I would have a strip of copper that I buried down into the
ground with its tip just sticking up. I think the copper does work. There was a product here
for some time - which seems to have disappeared off the market - which was actually a liquid
copper, and you could spray the top of the pot and the copper would dry on the top of the pot,
and well I believe I've got proof that it worked, because the very plants that I was trying to
protect were absolute slug and snail magnets, and they didn't eat the new shoots on these plants.
Which of course is why the pots and the shelves work. Because if you were to put, say, grit or
coffee grounds or whatever on your pot, and then the pot goes up, the snail or slug can't actually
burrow under that. No exactly, and what Helen said is actually all wildlife choose the easy way, and
it's not easy to go up three or four flights of shelves in order to get to something. So actually
there's a lot to be said, the pots and keeping it out the way, and making it just harder for the
snails and slugs to work their way up - obviously is a really good thing particularly for the young
plants. And certainly with particularly vegetable and flower growers. I mean most of the annuals
and things that we grow in our flower gardens and our vegetable gardens, the vast majority of them
seem to be great slug and snail fodder. So yes, the best thing you can do is to grow them up
to a decent size, in a reasonable size pot, before you put them into the ground, if you know
you have particularly bad slug and snail problems. And that brings us on to the slug resistant
plants. And now in many ways here in Australia, here in the UK, in North America and all
these other places, we actually grow a lot of the same plants. We've got lilies, we've got
dahlias, we've got roses, we've got all kinds of things - peonies. So we presumably have similarly
slug resistant plant categories. You can probably tell us these are the categories of plants to go
for that won't have slug and snail damage. Is that right? Yeah, well generally speaking, hard leafed
plants, so just to throw examples out there, I mean a slug or snail is not going to bother a
Camellia, because it's got those really hard, hard leaves. So anything that has really hard surface
to the foliage is likely not to be particularly attractive to slugs and snails. It's nearly always
the softer leafed plants that will. So certainly if you go down that avenue it can help. Funnily
enough some of the softer leaf things, if they're summer growing, when the weather is drier and
warmer, the slugs and snails tend to be less active at that time of the year. So if it's a
summer growing plant, that is dormant during the winter-spring months, that sometimes will find
its way past the slugs and snails, because they're hibernating when it gets too dry. Although that
may in normal summers not necessarily be a thing that works in England, because you do get cooler
weather than we get. But when it's really hot and dry here in Australia, the slugs and snails,
they'll all disappear into the rock work, in your rock walls, or into your clumps of agapanthus,
which seem to be the things that they love here, and they'll just hibernate until they get rain.
Then they'll come out and maraud things. But in the meantime, while it's hot and dry, they
stay away. Yes we had a very hot dry summer in the UK last year, and certainly my cannas and my
dahlias did not get slug and snail damage. Yeah, so it helps if you have weather that's in your
favour. Yes, but that's something we can't really control. No, you can't. And so what about things
like the rosemaries, the lavenders and a lot of the shrubs? Perfectly good plants - if you're
trying to discourage slugs of snails - because things that are really resinous are also not
likely to be things that they're going to have a go at. What about - I'm just looking
at this garden - agastache Monada? Yeah, again those sorts of plants are more herby-type
plants. They tend to have interesting chemicals in their leaves that you can smell when you brush
the leaves. So anything with an aromatic sort of leaf is likely to be less prone to slug and snail
attack. So you know rosemary, lavender - a lot of those herb type plants - are full of resins and
chemicals that in fact deter slugs and snouts. So they're perfectly good plants to grow for that
sort of thing. The other extreme of course tends to be things that have really highly nutritious
leaves, which is most of our vegetables, and also things in the legume family, the pea
family. When they're young they're very prone to slug and snail attack, as I can prove with many an
example from my nursery, and they can get to quite a good size. I've actually had laburnums that were
actually small trees already. They were probably a meter and a half, two meter tall, where we've
had a wet spell in the summer, and I haven't been paying attention, and the snails will crawl all
out the trunks of the laburnums and eat all the foliage off them. And they can do it virtually
overnight, which is odd when you consider Laburnum has poisonous seeds and all those sorts
of things. But anything that's a legume seems to be really popular with slugs and snails, because
I think they've got a lot of nitrogen in them, so they're very nutritious for our little
gastropods. So what about the really flowering plants - things like lilies, dahlias, cannas -
are there any of those that are particularly slug resistant? Well you've missed delphiniums, but
yes most of them are in fact comparatively tasty to slugs and snails. But certainly things like
liliums once they get above a certain height. It's when they're just coming through the ground that
they're more at risk. So you might put something over them to protect - like a plastic tea bottle
or something like that - just until they break the surface properly, and then the damage is likely
to be less of a problem. Same with dahlias - they tend to grow out of the problems to a large
extent. You'll get a few holes and things, but nothing major. And I think that they will come
from miles around for the average Delphinium or the average Hosta, and so you've just got to work
out a management system that's going to work for those particular plants. Certainly hostas - if
you've got a big problem with them - are great in big pots, and you can actually then have some
sort of control over slugs and snails, if you lift them up off the ground. Delphiniums - well they
really need to be in the ground, so you've just got to work out a technique of getting around that
first stage. And what about the slightly furry fuzzy leaves? Tends not to be as much of a problem
with slugs and snails. They don't seem to like the furry leaf plants as much. Roses - are they slug
resistant plants? Pretty well. You don't tend to find roses get attacked by them. There'll be
somebody out there that will say that's not true, because somebody will have had experience of slugs
and snails attacking their roses. The other thing with roses of course is being woody plants,
most of their foliage is well up off the ground when they break out into leaf in the spring. So
they're just physically a little bit further away from the slugs and snails. So the bigger something
grows, the less likely it's to be a problem in due course. Except of course with laburnums. I don't
know what it is that drags slugs and snails right up the top of the Laburnum, but they'll do it.
They know that on The Horti-Culturalists you often cover quite rare plants, and I often think people
who watch your channel must have actually very interesting gardens, because they're obviously
really interested in where plants come from, and how to make the best of them, and things
like that. So would you say that if a plant is rare or unusual, it might have more slug
damage, or less slug damage, or actually does that not correlate in any way? I don't think it
correlates. I mean certainly I've just raised a little batch of a very rare plant from Easter
Island - sophora toromiro - which is actually extinct in the wild - has been since I think the
beginning of the last century sometime - and it was found again in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.
And some seed was found in, believe it or not, Stockholm I think. And so the plant has been
sort of vaguely reintroduced into horticulture. I raised a batch of seedlings of it a few years
ago, and without thinking - because it is a legume I should have known better - one day they were
fine, the next day I came in the slugs and snails had eaten a lot. I've started a new batch of them.
I've got them up on a shelf. They're - probably, I don't know - four or five inches tall in the
old measurements, and they're doing really well, because they're well and truly up off the ground.
They're on a metal framed stand, so it's very hard for slugs and snails to get up there and get them.
But I think one of the things that people can take away from what I do in my garden, that might be
worth considering, is that of course if you're a mad plant collector, and you want to have
lots and lots of different plants around you, the issues are likely to be less of a problem
because you've only got one or two of something, and so if that becomes absolutely slug bait well
then maybe you might lose one or two plants. But if you're planting a whole garden up with
things as we do, when we're planting vegetables, where you're planting crops, then the damage can
be far more obvious and far more devastating in a way. So sometimes I just stop growing something
if it's particularly prone to an issue. Sometimes it's better just to take the easy way out and say
"Well, I'm not growing that anymore - let somebody else deal with that that's got the time." Because
the world's full of plants - so I've got lots of other things I can grow. I must ask you about
what I always think of as the London method of snail control. When I lived in London, we all had
very small gardens, and what people used to do was to pick off the slugs and snails and throw them
over the fence. And I do remember actually having dinner outside once, and a snail landing from
one of my neighbours. We threw it back again. Yeah I would have as well. I used to say "Brian,
we're sending that snail back." and he said "Oh, sorry about that". Yes, yeah well, I don't think
any of those things really work, because if your neighbour's throwing them over your fence and
you're picking them up and throwing them over the next person's fence, all you're doing is giving
them a holiday in somebody else's garden. I don't think that works. If you're going to deal with
it, I have to say tap dancing on snails at night works quite well, if you can bring yourself to
do it. It's generally what I do if I find them, because I regularly go around at night
just after dusk, if it's been raining, I go out to lock up the chickens, and I'll walk
around the garden. And if I see snails around, well, I just stomp on them, and that seems to
help keep the numbers down. And of course you could also presumably feed them to the chickens.
That's the other thing I regularly do, because unfortunately in this country, we don't have a lot
of wildlife that makes use of them, because the garden snail and slug came out here, so there's
not the natural predators of the garden snail here. But certainly chickens and ducks love
them. And if you want more up-to-date advice on how to deal with practical things in
your garden, don't miss our garden tips and techniques playlist at the end of this
video. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!
