Farmer Focus: Trapping slugs, more slugs and beetles
Andy Barr © MAG/Colin Miller I was nit-picking in my last article that I may have planted my wheat a week too early, but the weather has given me a reality check.
Now I’m just happy it’s in the ground and not under water.
The rain meant applying too many slug pellets, but judging by the lack of availability of many products, I’m not alone.
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I even applied a few to my cover crops, as I made the mistake of being too tight with them some years ago, only to have to try and redrill them in late October.
This would have been a bit tricky this year, and I need them for my Countryside Stewardship payment, if nothing else.
My Bofin Slimers Project slug traps first found many larger specimens, followed by a pleasing decline after pelleting.
However, these are now showing a concerning increase again – albeit in the guise of a lot of tiny little ones, presumably from eggs laid previously by those I got rid of.
I’m informed that egg hatching takes from two weeks to a month, depending on the temperature and moisture, but slugs could actually overwinter for up to five months if they fancy it. Excellent news.
As an add-on to the slug project, I have also been trapping beetles that might eat them.
We use sunken cups containing a water and washing-up liquid solution, to ensure they drown instead of eating each other.
Alarmingly, for someone who has been keen to encourage them for decades, we seem to be killing and counting hundreds every week. Hopefully, it is a drop in the ocean for their populations.
Mainly of interest are a variety of carabid species, but we are also capturing lots of rove beetles, millepedes, spiders and bugs, plus a few slugs and worms.
The resulting gooey solution has proven to have quite an aroma, and I’m now banned from examining them at the kitchen table.
