Slugs on strawberries are very disastrous to the strawberry plants and fruits, so the sight of slugs in your garden should be worrisome.

Slugs on Strawberries

Thankfully, these pests are easy to repel. To learn how to stop slugs eating strawberries in your garden, read this article.

How Can You Get Rid of Slugs on Strawberries?

You can get rid of slugs on strawberries by removing them as soon as you see them, repelling them with various products, and consistently checking your garden for slugs during the cool periods of the day. You can even set some traps for the slugs.

1. Check Your Strawberries Twice Daily

Most strawberry pests, such as slugs, are active at night. If you’ve ever asked “what is eating my strawberries?” because you cannot find pests around the place yet you see bite marks, you may be checking your strawberries at the wrong hours. Slugs, snails, and many other pests are nocturnal, so you will most likely find them around your strawberries late in the evening or early in the morning.

Check Your Strawberries Twice Daily

The best time to check the plants is at night when it’s completely dark. However, you will see slugs around the plants if you can check very early. Make sure you check the fruits and other juicy parts of your plants.

2. Remove the Slugs Immediately

It’s quite difficult to always stop slugs from reaching your strawberries, especially if there are a lot of slugs in or around your garden. If one or two slugs find a way to reach your strawberries, you should remove them as soon as you see them. Do not leave them on the plants or fruits for an extra second, as they will continue to cause damage to the plant.

After removing them, you should either dispose of them as far away from the garden as possible or kill them immediately. Killing them is the best option because they will not return to your garden or mate to produce offspring that will visit your garden.

3. Remove Fruits and Leaves From the Ground

Something attracts slugs to your garden. If you can find and remove it, you have successfully solved your slug problem.

Remove Fruits and Leaves From the Ground

Search for leaves, fruits, rotting products, and anything organic that you do not need in your garden and remove them. The tidier your garden is, the less likely the slugs will attack your strawberries.

4. Protect Your Strawberries With Copper

Copper tape, copper wire, and products coated with copper can repel slugs, as copper has properties that repel pests such as mollusks and some microbes.

You just have to coat the base of your strawberries with copper to repel the slugs. Make sure that every part of the plant touching the ground is coated with the slug repellent.

5. Protect Your Strawberries With Diatomaceous Earth

Diatomaceous earth is an awesome product that helps to repel so many types of garden pests. This powder is made of the fossil of some microbes, and it has anti-slug properties.

You only need to buy it from a store and spray it around your strawberries, especially in the evening.

6. Use Slug Bait

Here are some slug traps that you can use:

  • Iron phosphate: You can easily find it in gardening stores. Pour the product far away from your garden so that the pests will leave your garden plants alone.
  • Beer traps: This is more effective, as you’d wake in the morning and find dead slugs. Pour any beer (with barley) on bowls and distribute these bowls across your garden at night.

You may need to use these products every night for a few weeks before you’d see a significant decline in the slug population in your garden.

7. Make Use of Soapy Water

A very cheap and easy-to-make product that you can use to get rid of slugs on your strawberries is just a solution made of water and soap. You only need to mix soap and water, then spray your strawberry stems and leaves to prevent slugs from reaching the plants.

Make Use of Soapy Water

Do not overwater the plants so that you do not expose them to the chemicals in soap. Also, you may need to use this product daily, as its effects wear out in hours.

8. Protect the Strawberries With a Cloth or Mesh

In the evening or before you sleep, inspect your plants. When you are sure that there are no pests on the plants, cover the plants with a net or cloth. The covering will prevent pests from reaching the plants at night. Also, the covering will not disturb your plants’ photosynthesis, as you will uncover them when morning comes.

Another advantage of covering your plants is that the plants will grow in stable temperatures at night. Just remember to uncover them at dawn. Also, use a breathable material.

9. Make Use of Organic Repellents

Some organic products that you can try using citrus peels and coffee grounds. Citrus peels are acidic, and the juices in them repel snails and slugs. As for coffee, it is less effective but the caffeine present in it also helps to repel slugs.

When growing strawberries, you should make use of organic slug repellents if you are growing an organic garden. You can search the constituents of molluscicides and research to find out organic products that are rich in those constituents.

10. Be More Active in the Spring and Fall Months

Slugs do not just prefer hours of the day with little to no sun; they also prefer months of the year with cool and humid atmospheres. You will most likely find slugs in your garden in the spring and fall months. This means that you should plan most of your slug prevention techniques for the spring and fall months.

As spring or fall approaches, raise the rocks in your garden and search for other places where slugs can hide in. Remove as many slugs as you can so that the damage of slugs in your garden will be minimal when the cool and humid months come.

11. Grow Your Strawberries on Raised Beds

Here are a few reasons why growing your strawberries on raised garden beds can help stop slugs from reaching the plants:

Grow Your Strawberries on Raised Beds

  • The plants are farther: Plants in raised garden beds are less prone to pest attacks in the soil because the pests need to climb the bed frame first before reaching the plants.
  • The soil surface is dryer: One pro of raised garden beds is that water dries out quickly from the surface. Slugs do not like creeping through dry surfaces.
  • Slugs may find it hard to climb the frame: Depending on the type of frame you use, slugs may find it very difficult to reach your plants. For example, you could try coating the frame with copper.

Conclusion

Now, you have learned how to protect strawberries from pests such as slugs.

Here’s a list to summarize the article:

  • Search your garden in the morning and evenings for slugs, as slugs are more active at cool periods of the day.
  • Organic products such as citrus fruit peels and coffee can help, but they are not very reliable, as they rot quickly.
  • If you’d love to learn how to keep slugs off strawberry plants organically, study the constituents of molluscicides and search for organic products that are rich in those constituents.
  • You want to remove fruits, leaves, and anything that attracts slugs to your garden from the ground.
  • If you see slugs on your strawberries, remove and kill them immediately.

After applying the tips in this article, you will get minimal to no slug damage in your garden. Awesome, right?

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