Slugs and snails are all eating up your garden: ‘Record year, all gone’ | RTL News

Anyone who loves gardening will know the frustration. If you have new plants, they will be gone in no time. “I could cry,” one person wrote in a popular vegetable gardening group on Facebook. Everyone complains a lot. “It’s already the third time I’ve grown everything, and everything is eaten.”

Humid and not warm yet

It is not surprising that there are so many snails now. It’s humid and not very warm yet. “Snails are like that,” says Marieke Dekker of IVM Nature Education. “Specifically, because it’s still a little cooler, they’re moving quickly and reproducing quickly.” It immediately has an important addition: it concerns mainly slugs. “Snails are real scavengers and will not easily get to your fresh plants.”

The snails appear every year around this time, but the situation has become quite extreme now, Decker says. “For me, it’s a really record year. It’s also been a very wet period. But everything I grow is eaten before I see anything.”

My injured colleagues on the course

Dekker offers many courses in vegetable farming, and it is no coincidence that students are called “fellow sufferers” in this field. “This has been the most discussed topic for years. People are giving each other hundreds of thousands of pieces of advice.”

People also fall over each other online with tips. This, of course, is accompanied by the necessary frustration. Like the person below. It turns out that tension nets are not enough to stop snails:

So, this gardener is going to a “snail beer party.” This means: a beer trap, in which snails drown. “Because snails really like beer,” says Marieke Decker. “Very effective, but then you have to really focus on killing the snails. I think it’s less so, we’re more focused on the natural balance.”

When it gets dark, they come out

Natural balance. Difficult word for frogs and hedgehogs. Because they love snails. “So make sure your garden isn’t too messy and there’s some water. Frogs also have some hiding places.”

This gardener is already betting on the frog’s arrival:

But Decker has to be honest: You probably won’t get rid of the snails completely right now. There are simply too many. When it gets dark they come out and start eating. “Then you must find them and remove them.”

“That would be fine, but later.”

Another natural snail antagonist you can use is strong-smelling herbs. According to Decker, planting thyme can help. She tried parsley herself this year. “But soon there was nothing left of it. It was all gone.”

But wait, what then? How do we maintain our optimism? “Well, not really,” are Decker’s encouraging words. But still: “Patience. This will work, but it will come later. Keep focusing on diversity in your garden. And then the vegetable garden season will be great eventually, once the snails are gone.”