Do Slugs Eat Pumpkins
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Do Slugs Eat Pumpkins?

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If you are wanting to grow some pumpkins on your plot or in your garden then you will want to know what could eat them. Slugs are always a problem in the UK, but are they a problem for pumpkins? Do slugs even eat pumpkins? Let’s have a look and find out.

Do Slugs Eat Pumpkins
Do Slugs Eat Pumpkins

So, Do Slugs Like Pumpkins?

From my own experience slugs love all members of the squash family and will happily munch away on the young leaves. They can be devastating to young plants and kill them off completely but once the pumpkin is established then slugs won’t do too much damage.

Do They Eat The Fruit?

Slugs can actually eat the actual pumpkins that your plant produces. This is nowhere near as common as them eating the leaves though and there are a few factors which can change this.

They tend to only be able to eat young pumpkins as the skin is too tough on older pumpkins for them. They will also struggle with varieties that produce tougher skinned pumpkins.

How to deal with slugs

The classic way to kill off slugs and it does work, there are however drawbacks.

Firstly the little blue pellets aren’t safe to have around if you have pets or young children who might digest them accidentally.

Next, there is the fact that they may be harmful to slugs’ natural predators like hedgehogs who eat slugs killed by pellets, therefore, ingesting the poison themselves.

And then there is the mess they leave, lots of dead slugs on the surface of your garden with nasty trails everywhere.

This is a natural and organic way to kill slugs. There are all kinds of nematodes, which are tiny little creatures that live in your soil, some of these nematodes kill slugs.

This is completely natural and is what happens in your soil all the time. By adding nematodes you are just increasing the number of the slug killing type.

One of the advantages of this method aside from the fact you don’t have to use poison is that part of the way the nematodes kill the slugs makes them burrow into the ground before dying, so no nasty dead slugs lying around!

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The manual method, and as is often the case with the manual method, this is very effective but time-consuming. Wait until dark and go out into the garden with a torch, some gloves and a bucket and start collecting slugs.

This is best done on a damp night after heavy rain as then the slugs will be everywhere, happy hunting!

You can set up traps to capture slugs and then dispose of them how you wish. There are lots of different ways to do this but one of the more popular ones is a beer trap.

With a beer trap, you set a container, usually a plastic tub of some kind, level with the surface of the soil. You want it level with the surface so slugs can easily get into it but you want the bottom to be deep, so they can’t get out.

You then fill the bottom with some beer, which slugs adore, and leave it. The slugs will make their way into the trap and either drown or be waiting there come morning for you to get rid of them.

One downside to this apart from all the slug carcases you will be getting rid of is that the beer is so potent that it can apparently attract slugs up to 200 meters away and therefore bring even more slugs into your garden than were there before!

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2 Comments

  1. If a slug has eaten the new shoot and two leaves from the seed is it truly a “gonner” or will the shoot push up more from the seed and developed leaves again?🙏

    1. In my experience, it is probably a gonner, but it is always worth a try sticking with it while possibly sowing another, although it is getting late in the season for pumpkins!

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