One downside to the wet winter and cool spring we’ve had is that earwigs, pill bugs, slugs, and snails have found this weather heavenly, and they continue to munch on my vegetables even during these first days of summer.
But I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. I share them with you in case you haven’t used them, and I present them in order from best to less-than-best.
Hunt after sunset
The most effective way to eliminate the pests (from this cohort) that are damaging your vegetables is to go out after sunset with a headlamp on and spot the feeders in the act. In the dark is when they are active.
Last week, I was getting a lot of damage on seedlings of lettuce and kale so I spent the time each evening for three evenings in a row looking at the plants and squishing the earwigs, pill bugs, and slugs that were feeding on them. My method is to squish them right in place, whether they’re on the leaves or on the ground under the plants. The damage was almost nil after that.
It’s likely that you can’t kill enough of them in just one night to stop the damage, but I’ve found that three nights in a row usually is sufficient for eliminating damage for the next few months at least.
(See my post, “Night gardening.”)
Chickens
Chickens love to eat earwigs and slugs so they’re a great weapon at eliminating the damage from those two pests, but they only occasionally eat pill bugs and slugs. Herein lies the only significant flaw in using chickens to debug a vegetable bed: they don’t consume all of the pests. Nevertheless, I often run my chickens over a bed before planting and they certainly eliminate most of these buggers. I did this with a few beds a few weeks ago, and then I sowed corn and now the corn is growing without damage.
Employing chickens to eat these pests is also not a great method if plants are already in the ground because the chickens will cause at least some damage to plants in addition to eating the pests.
Delay spring planting
​​​​​​​Waiting to plant zucchini in June rather than March, for example, usually avoids much damage from these pests because the pests are less numerous and active at the end of spring compared to the beginning.
Other crops that earwigs, pill bugs, snails and slugs like to eat include peppers, pumpkin, cucumbers, eggplant, and beans. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that they do not damage tomatoes, except for very small seedlings.
(See my post, “Don’t rush to plant warm-season vegetables in Southern California.”)
Hiding place traps
If you make a hiding place that is attractive to these pests — such as a rolled up newspaper, section of old hose, or section of carpet — you can place them near your vegetables and then check them in the morning. You may find some hiding there, and you can dispose of them.
But I’ve never trapped enough with this method to make it as effective as hunting and squishing after sunset, which is why I prefer the hunting.
Oil traps
If you’re only dealing with earwigs, then you can trap tons with oil in a can. I use a tuna or cat food can, filled about a half inch with canola oil. Place the can near your plants in the evening; find it teeming with dead earwigs the next morning.
I’ve found a few slugs in these traps too, but never a snail or a pill bug.
Copper tape
If you’re growing in pots or planters, then you might get good prevention of snails and slugs by wrapping the pots or planters in copper tape. I’ve never done this myself, but I’ve seen photos and heard from others that it works moderately well.
Poison
There are a few poisons that kill these critters, such as Sluggo Plus. One downside of most poisons, however, is that you inevitably kill some other critters that were not causing you a problem. And all critters are of some benefit to the garden in some way so don’t want to kill more than is necessary.
Reduce habitat
Earwigs, pill bugs, sow bugs, and slugs like to spend the night in a dark, moist place. If you have compost or wood chips in your vegetable garden or in your containers, then you are providing habitat for them. You’re almost inviting them.
You can reduce this hospitality by keeping a vegetable garden of bare dirt, without any compost wood chips on the surface.
I put loads of compost in my vegetable garden and cover my paths with wood chips, making my vegetables surrounded by habitat for these creatures. If I had bare dirt, I would have fewer of them. But I would suffer other problems, such as nutrient deficiency, soil crusting, and more weeds.
It’s a trade off that I am making by adding a lot of compost to my vegetable beds. Maybe you are making this trade off too. Trade offs are acceptable, as long as we are aware of their consequences.
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Occasionally I would spread diatomaceous earth around my vegies to prevent them from crawling across the ground inthe bed.
Thanks, Tom. I forgot about diatomaceous earth. My recollection is that it’s effective for snails and slugs but not earwigs or pill bugs. Is that right?
Greg, you might try & add some soy sauce to your earwig trap. The soy seems to be candy for the beasts, and then the oil takes them. BTW, your youtube channel is quite helpful. I get my trees from Maddock and haven’t lost one yet thanks to you.
Thanks, Bob. I’ll try out the soy sauce. Maddock makes great trees; I bought a seedling mango from them a month ago and it’s doing well.
Thanks for this post! I especially like the oil trap for ear wigs. When I picked artichokes I couldn’t believe the number of earwigs that kept coming out!!
I brought my first home growen artichoke into the house and put in the kitchen sink and screamed as dozens of earwigs scooted out all over my kitchen. Never brought anymore in the house or ever grew artichoke again!!
My biggest problem with sow/pill bugs was in my compost. I didn’t dare use a shovelful where it might do some good. That shovelful would be holding at least a hundred of the bugs. I finally cleared that up by putting a sprinkler on the pile, and running it until completely saturated and the bugs drowned. Then repeating this in a couple of weeks when the surviving eggs hatched a new batch of bugs.
Good idea, David. Reminds me of how both pill bugs, sow bugs, and earwigs will emerge if you water around a plant too. That can get them to reveal themselves at any time of day, and then you can grab or squish them.
This kind of content is why I love this blog. Earwigs and pill bugs are a BIG deal in San Diego gardening, and I never hear them talked about on national gardening resources.
I’m definitely under the impression that these bugs eat small tomato seedlings. This year, I had a San Diego tomato that got eaten almost to death its first night. Dousing it in DE saved it, and I remove the lower leaves of a new seedling once it’s grown several upper leaves. Once this ‘ladder’ is no longer available, I don’t think I’ve ever lost a plant to these bugs. The earwigs were at plague levels for me this year, so hopefully next year is better!
Thanks as always for the great content. I would love to see a post on companion planting if you do any of that. I recently read Plant Partners and Gaia’s Garden, and I’m starting a bunch of flowers and trap crops from seed and doing some trial and error to try to attract predatory bugs to my garden.
Great comment, Jessica! I should have clarified above that I haven’t noticed these pests damaging large tomato plants but yes, they do chew on very small tomato seedlings. I lost a few this way this spring. (I edited the post to make this clear.)
While I don’t have a post on companion planting, I do have one by another name: Interplanting vegetables.
I chose to title it that way because I wanted to distinguish it from companion planting, as I haven’t seen much evidence for some of the claims about companion planting, not to mention that advice about it can be unnecessarily complicated.
But I do lots of interplanting among different vegetables, plus vegetables and berries or fruit trees or flowers. Here is another post about interplanting vegetables within a strawberry patch. And here is a post about planting vegetables under fruit trees.
And here is a post about my experiences incorporating flowers. This post is now five years old, and today I feel even stronger about the benefits of having flowers around that provide food for beneficial insects of all sorts (whether pollinators or predators of aphids, etc.).
I think you hit the nail on the head; it’s the tomato seedlings that are too small. That one was very small because I bought it from a nursery, while my transplants grown from seed were large enough to have the lower leaves removed and didn’t suffer the same damage. They may even have deployed some natural defenses already, because this year the earwigs made it up into the picnic table where I harden off my plants– I think that was a first!
Thank you for the links. Can’t believe I missed the one on planting flowers to attract bees! I was probably using the wrong search term. I agree, there’s too much information that’s not supported by data. Plant Partners was research-based and mentioned things like using Blue Hubbard as a trap crop for other squash and planting composite/asteraceae flowers to attract good bugs, but I still have a lot of questions about which ones will like my climate and exactly where to plant them. I’m trying to get in some perennials that bloom at various times so I’ve got good bugs at the ready before they’re needed. I’ve noticed the same thing with the pollenators loving bolted herbs. And I have the same weird aversion to flowers! I’ve made exceptions for ones that smell really good like gardenia and stephanotis, but largely I have a prejudice about them being “too girly for me” or “too fussy” or something. I even find myself trying to avoid bright colors as I plant them for the bugs. I blame capitalism, or the patriarchy, or something 😂 But I think I’ll get over it too with time.
I’ve planted a bunch of clover in my main vegetable bed– hoping for some nitrogen fixation (which per Gaia’s Garden, does occur with living donors due to the constant natural die-off and replacement of tiny terminal roots) and that it reduces evaporation. The hover flies are definitely loving the alyssum. The perennials and natives I’ve started are still too small to tell, but hopefully a few will get established and handle my frost. Thanks for the chat as always!
I’ve been catching tons of pill bugs in beer traps (usually used to catch slugs).
Oh yes, I forgot about beer traps. Apparently, slugs are attracted to the yeast? I hadn’t known they would attract pill bugs though. Can’t wait to try this out. Thanks, Sara.
Hi Greg – Wow well here I thought I was enriching my raised beds and in ground veggies with great organic compost only to find out that was the magnet for the millions of roly-poly bugs on literally everything! Except tomatoes. So I’m grateful for that but all other tender herbs, beans etc are their victims. Not to mention they keep multiplying while our temps have stalled and cooled so tomato and peppers (and everything else heat loving) are in complete neutral!
As always your insights are invaluable!
Timely post! Good reminder to ride with the tide. We’ve also found that birds (particularly wrens) love earwigs, so we’ve added some bird boxes around the garden to welcome them. We also get the occasional skunk and raccoon digging holes in the garden searching for snails, slugs and worms. They sometimes destroy new transplants / starts, but seeing the carnage they’re prey causes helps me appreciate their role!
I’ve used copper “tape” for years and it’s terrific for keeping snails off of fruit trees.