slug control: ducks in the garden
Like 4 Dislike 0 Published on 30 Dec 2011
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A lot of gardeners struggle with slugs. Slugs will eat all of a garden, in some areas, if left unchecked. And yet, ducks love to eat slugs! So this is definitely an organic slug control method.
I have tried on about four previous occassions to get video of ducks or geese eating slugs, but the video always turned out iffy: you couldn't quite see it. Or the ducks/geese go squeemish - so they were so far away you couldn't see them eat the slugs in the video.
I kept trying and eventually ended up with this excellent video footage.
First we hear from Jen Davis, of Portland, Oregon. This is just a tiny bit that she had to say about controlling slugs. She expresses that she doesn't like to kill slugs without purpose. Having the ducks eat the slugs makes her much more comfortable. She talks about how her chickens weren't all that interested in eating slugs. With her current ducks, they eat so many slugs, that she now breeds slugs to feed to her ducks!
Samantha from Woodinville, Washington feeds HUGE slugs to her ducks. We get really good video of the ducks eating the slugs out of her hand.
That is a huge woodpecker at the end.
Bill Mollison, the inventor of permaculture, is famous for saying something like "you don't have an excess of slugs, you have a duck deficiency."
Relevant threads at permies:
http://www.permies.com/t/9990/critter-care/sorts-ducks-slug-control
http://www.permies.com/t/609/critter-care/slugs
http://www.permies.com/t/4268/organic-sustainable-practices/Organic-Slug-Control
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