News Feed Forums Vegetables nutrient imbalance that slugs and snails are attracted to? Reply To: nutrient imbalance that slugs and snails are attracted to?

  • Christopher Whitehorn

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    April 10, 2023 at 7:41 am
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    Not certain if there’s any specific nutrient imbalance to make your plants vulnerable to slugs, other than generally low nutrition/vigor that keeps the brix low. Have you looked into using other biocontrols? Ducks love snails and on a quarter acre you wouldn’t need many, a small flock of runners maybe 1 male and 4-6 females. The only reason I mention using animals is that the notion of balanced nutrition being the silver bullet for all woes is lacking. Balanced nutrition is good, but you need other facets of the system to maintain health, including beneficial insects and other predator species. This goes all the way up the chain too. For example if you’re doing poultry tractors or sheep, you might get predation losses that affect your operation, so the easiest answer is get dogs to protect your flock/herd. The trick to figuring out your solutions is to look at it as a wholistic system of countermeasures, often with pesticides and fungicides being the “nuclear option” in organic-aspiring operations. Interested to see if anyone has any insights!

    edit: Looking at Dr. Dykstra’s chart for brix, you want your plant brix above 9.