How to stop slugs eating plants using an Irrigatia system

Choosing when you water your plants has more of an impact on slugs and snails assailing your garden than you would first have thought. But by using an Irrigatia automatic watering system, making sure your plants are watered at the optimum time is taken out of your hands.

There are specific weather conditions that particularly favour slugs, so limiting these conditions in your garden will go a long way to keeping them at bay. Slugs love moist conditions, and they are most active in the evening, so watering your plants as a last act of the day can create the perfect conditions for them.

This is where Irrigatia does all the work for you. All the Irrigatia kits are powered and motivated by sunlight, allowing this to dictate when your plants require water. Not only does the Irrigatia solar panel power the kit, but it also uses bright sunlight as an indicator that your plants require more water. Once the weather darkens in the evening and the sun fades, the Irrigatia kit will stop supplying your garden with water, which allows the soil to dry out enough in the evening to deter slugs and snails from the area.

You can also have some manual control over how much water your Irrigatia kit outputs in your garden, to suit slug-deterring needs. There is a button the side of Irrigatia kits which allow you to adjust how much water the pump outputs to the drippers. So if you have some plants which are particularly susceptible to slug and snail visits, you can easily reduce the amount of watering to that plant, to make the environment less favourable to these pests.

Not only does an irrigation system help avoid overwatering your soil once the sunlight fades at the end of the day, but it also keeps the water contained to exactly where you need it. Watering with a watering can or a hose will spread water all over your containers, patio, lawn and more, whilst the Irrigatia tubing and drippers will only pour water exactly where you direct it to, making access to your raised beds, pots, containers, and borders less inviting for these gastropods.

Watering is one important change you can make to deter slugs and snails from your precious plants, but you can also use other organic methods.

One method which I use in my raised beds is using ground-up eggshells to create barriers around my plants which are uncomfortable for slugs to climb over. All you need to do is dry your eggshells out, either with time, or by placing them in the microwave or oven, and grinding them down into small pieces. Try not to ground them down too much, or they won’t have any sharp edges. Then, scatter them in an impenetrable border around any plants you would like to protect.

Copper wire is another popular choice among gardeners and can be great for adding to pots and containers for a decorative trim which serves a helpful purpose. Research has shown that slugs really don’t like to crawl over copper, and it is theorised their slime reacts with the copper to give the pests a tiny electric shock, keeping them at bay.

Some tactical planting could also go a long way to keep slugs away from certain parts of your garden. There are certain plants which contain compounds which slugs are deterred by as they are toxic to slugs and snails, so they will naturally avoid them. Plants such as chives, shallots, garlic, leaks, and onions all contain the slug-deterring compound ‘allicin,’ which is harmless to the rest of the garden, and to you.

Keeping your plants as slug and snail-free as possible can be simply achieved using Irrigatia’s solar-powered watering kits, and plenty of other garden-friendly methods.

Discover the perfect automatic solar-powered watering kit for your garden today at Irrigatia.