Slugs Like Garlic!

At least some of our slugs do. Fortunately, garlic’s reputation as a slug repellant isn’t the only reason we are planting them as companion plants in our garden. If they make great trap plants, that’s still a bonus.

Two of our garlic plants are clearly getting chewed by slugs. Some of our other garlic plants show signs of slugs having crawled up to their tops to scrape the green parts of their tender tips down to the cellulose. I haven’t seen the slugs in action yet, but the damage shown on the larger leaves near their base is clearly caused by slugs.

The third photo shows our happiest—but kind of weirdly short and stocky—garlic plant. It’s growing in the strawbale garden, which is the part of our garden that has seen the least slug damage.

The other two photos are of garlic growing in our hügelkultur / strawberry bed. You can see a laden strawberry plant in the background of the first photo. Both pictures from this bed include improvised plastic cloches over volunteer tomato plants. They germinated when the soil was in the 50’s-f.

This morning I checked soil temps again, and while they had gotten up to the low 60s during a little warm spell, they are back down into the low 50’s-f again, and our pea and radish seeds are reluctant to germinate (although a few of each have), and our strawberries are not ripening. It will eventually (hopefully) get warm enough for the strawbs to ripen and for more seeds to germinate.

As far as using garlic as a companion plant, you may have different results than us. There are about a zillion different species of slugs, and your mix might be different than ours. We will continue using them as a companion plant, but we are also diversifying our alliums with some chives and some shallots. Hopefully, the slugs won’t like them as much as they do the garlic. :)

Hey, what are your favorite companion plants? Have you found any that actually repel slugs?