Not Coffee Grounds: Keep Slugs & Snails At Bay With A Highly-Rated Amazon Product

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When you've spent all day planting out your new vegetable and flower seedlings, it can be quite devastating to come out to your garden the following morning and see that your precious little plants have been a scrumptious feast for a party of slugs and snails. These annoying pests come out at night and love to work their way through young plants. While there are ways to use coffee grounds to deter these pests, if you don't have the time or inclination to put these into practice, there's a highly-rated Amazon product that will help: Monterey Sluggo.

This handy and effective snail and slug killer comes in a shaker can full of granules that you just sprinkle around your garden. Best of all, it's less toxic to pets or wildlife compared to products that have metaldehyde in them, so you can use it with confidence around your yard. In fact, the product is listed by the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) as being safe for organic gardening. Customers who have used this product have given it a 4.5-star rating overall, and most agree that the product is easy to use and highly effective at getting rid of slugs and snails. However, a few customers did mention that mold started to grow on the pellets that were out in the garden. This could possibly be avoided by being fairly light-handed when putting the granules out. To be completely safe when using the product, make sure you wear gloves and prevent your pets from consuming any of the pellets. That's why scattering the product in the early evening is a good idea.

The active ingredient in this product is iron phosphate, which is a compound consisting of iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Iron phosphate is found in a number of products that are primarily designed to kill slugs and snails in the home garden, and some of them have been approved to be used in organic farming. In fact, using Sluggo is just one non-toxic way to keep slugs from damaging your hostas and other susceptible plants in your garden. The iron phosphate damages the digestive tissue in the mollusks, which means that they stop eating and eventually die, usually within three to six days. After consuming the granules, the slugs and snails will crawl away to hide, which means you likely won't see many dead ones around.

While iron phosphate can be found in a variety of food products, such as bread, milk, pasta, and other beverages, the National Pesticide Information Center suggests that dogs can become ill if they eat large quantities of iron, so it's best to avoid exposure. You should also avoid breathing in the dust or getting the product on your skin. An added bonus of using iron phosphate to get rid of slugs and snails is that any leftover granules will break down and add nutrients to the soil. That's why using these pellets is one of the better ways to keep slugs out of the garden, especially if you're short on time and want something that's going to work quickly.