ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Garden slugs are a fact of life in Alaska.
“The gray garden slug is very common. It’s an anthropogenic slug. It follows people everywhere. Everywhere we garden, it shows up pretty much. It’s been in Alaska for as long as we’ve had agriculture in Alaska,” said Joey Slowik, Integrated Pest Management Technician with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension.
“It’s a native of Europe, as best we can tell, you know probably introduced with the Mayflower as far as we can tell. It’s been here for for a very long time, but it’s definitely not native to Alaska.”
Still, it’s everywhere. Slowik said they’ve estimated between 250,000 to 600,000 slugs per acre. This makes the difficult to get rid of.
Slowik and others study slugs at the Mat-Su Experimental Farm in Palmer.
“We’ve learned that most people have just a really high population of slugs. So, the pesticides to kill the slug don’t really work because there’s just too many slugs to move right back in after you kill a bunch of them,” Slowik said.
He said the best way to protect your garden is a good barrier.
“You can get low-volt electric fences that work really effectively at keeping slugs out of your raised beds,” Slowik said. He means low volt, like made from a 9-volt battery. They’ve also been working on barriers at the Experimental Farm.
We’ve been developing a bent metal fence, so it’s like a twice-bent fence, that just sort of deters slugs from climbing around the fence and getting into the plot,” Slowik said. He says they’ve seen pretty good success with this method.
Another barrier that can help is to take away vegetation from around your garden.
“You don’t have directly lawn up to the garden, so you’re putting in maybe a gravel pathway that’s generally dry, but it’s devoid of vegetation. And so, for a slug to get from your lawn all the way over to where your garden is, they’ve actually got to cross this open area that they don’t really like. And so you’re going to deter a lot of the slugs from migrating that way, too.”
Slowik says the traditional beer traps will capture slugs but since there are so many slugs around, more will just move into your garden if you don’t have a barrier up.
Slowik points out that while slugs are annoying, they have a purpose.
“Slugs are great decomposers for most of the stuff that slugs are eating is already dead or rotting. They prefer overly mature things, and so they’re doing a great job. Kind of like earthworms are nutrient-cyclers. Um, the problem is that they also feed on growing and green stuff,” Slowik said. “We don’t have pathogens spread by the slugs that we have in Alaska. They can be annoying as they destroy some of our crops and stuff, but there’s nothing to worry about. They’re not carrying any diseases.
“So for those of us that are more familiar with slugs, yeah, we’ll pick them out of our leafy greens or pick them off our head of cabbage, but our cabbage is still edible. It’s still fine.”
The European Black Slug is a recent invasive species that is quite destructive to crops. The Cooperative Extension wants you to report those and other slugs you see around Alaska!
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