hello my name is Richard Merritt I'm the owner of New Hampshire hostas and I'm here today to explain to you how to control slugs in your garden the only solution that I found it that's really effective is Sluggo there are poisonous products out there with metaldehyde in them that are equally effective a little bit cheaper but they're also very dangerous to pets children and wildlife so to me it's a no brainer you spend a few extra pennies and use the slow go now what I want to tell you today is how to apply it when to apply it so that you get the most benefit out of it one of the important things is to be pre-emptive don't wait until you see the damage just accept the fact that they're there in your garden when the nights in the spring start to stay about 50 degrees that's when you should be applying your Sluggo that's when you should start it'll tell you on the container how to just broadcast a pattern of shaking it out but what we do because we have got so many gardens and you can do this at home if you if you have extensive gardens we just use a hand spreader and walk like that and a very light even pattern seems to be the most effective way to control them as far as moisture in the garden when you're doing it you don't want it to be bone-dry it'll tell you in the container to actually apply water to activate it but on the other hand you don't want standing water from puddles or heavy rains if you're expecting heavy rains delay it until afterwards the reason is that the heavy rain will dilute it to such a degree that it won't become effective and it won't be there probably less about two weeks in the garden but if you did it properly you will have killed nearly 100% of the slugs so we do it about once every month here and that seems to be effective we have noticed that different areas of our property have different amounts of slug infestation the reason for this is that it's partly moisture the more moist the garden the more moist the weather pattern you in the more slugs are going to have the other one is location for the gardens that we have along the woodland border where the slugs just keep coming out of the woods those have to be done more often a garden like this that backs up against the retail building it's surrounded by the parking lot stone there are too many slugs in here and they can't get in here they can't travel over the stone and they're not being constantly reintroduced as they are on the woodland garden so just think it through and you you'll get to know your role in the garden and and know where you need to concentrate your effort a little bit more there are a lot of home remedies like crushed eggshells diatomaceous earth things of that nature beer in sauces actually works but they're very time-consuming and they're also not as effective at controlling everything when you broadcast properly you're covering all the area that the slugs are in if you try to do that with sauces of beer it's very difficult although I will tell you that a saucer of beer is a good way to monitor if you put down the saucer and you get a lot of slugs you know you've got a bad infestation but you probably would have known this anyway by the leaf pattern if you're seeing leaves like this April snow that has this chewed up pattern then you know you have a bad infestation I took this from another garden that's along the woodland in order to show you this garden has almost no damage you can see the lakeside ripples here almost three feet tall fantabulous about two feet tall and his honor also almost three feet tall with no slug damage in them at all we have treated them and we did it early in the year so that they would be protected so that's about all I want to tell you it's it's not rocket science it's really easy Sluggo is the product you'll find it on our website and I hope you use it and you have good results so happy gardening