Slugs prefer to eat old decaying material and important decomposing organisms, but if that isn’t available they will eat almost any plant.
These pests can be a real problem in cool, wet conditions. They are extremely insatiable and when abundant they can devour an entire bed of seedlings in a night, or strip mature plants.
They also reproduce rapidly and can produce up to three generations annually. They don’t even need to mate, and each one is capable of producing 400 round white eggs annually.
Fed up with slugs munching away at her hydrangeas, one woman took to the Hydrangeas in the UK Facebook page to ask for advice.
Fal Fal wrote: “Heard some said slugs don’t eat hydrangea leaves but when I place my plant outdoors overnight for these two or three days, I found the leaf has been eaten like this.
“I also found many slugs sucking around the pot. Any ways to deter the slugs effectively?
“My tulip leaves also suffered from being made holes even more seriously.”
While it is not common for slugs to eat hydrangea leaves, they are partial to young hydrangea plants.
You can tell if they are a problem when you see ragged edges and holes in the hydrangea leaves.
Slugs don’t prefer to eat hydrangeas, they prefer to eat old decaying material. However, if there is no other food, they will munch on the leaves and leave your hydrangea looking sad pretty fast.
To rid this problem group members in the comments section recommended using eggshells as a deterrent.
Chantel Henson said: “You need to make a barrier to deter them and eggshells are a game-changer. They won’t crawl over it.”
Elizabeth Aiken wrote: “Eggshells on the soil. It’ll be too sharp for them and they won’t get to the plant.”
Kim Brannon replied: “The sharp edges of eggshells help as a deterrent, but only when they are clean and dry.”
When peeling an egg, try to remove the inner membrane and rinse if needed and be aware that rain quickly makes the eggshells lose their effectiveness.
Eggshells not only act as a slug deterrent for hydrangeas, it also give the plant a “calcium boost”. Calcium helps with cell wall strength, ensuring that hydrangeas remain “robust and healthy”, according to Bryan Clayton, CEO at GreenPal.
