Before You Try Copper, Use This Bathroom Staple To Deter Snails In The Garden

Whether you're growing your own vegetables or you have a passion for annual flowers, keeping those seedlings protected so they have a chance to reach maturity can be an all-consuming endeavor. One of the main problems you're going to face is an invasion of snails and slugs that will happily feed on those tender little plants until there's nothing left. However, before you head off to your local garden center to buy some copper tape to use as a barrier, another possible solution could be a bathroom staple that you may not even have considered: baby powder.

While there are other reasons why you'll want a bottle of baby powder around when gardening, you can use this inexpensive product to create a barrier around your delicate plants that may cause snails to avoid them altogether. Now, like many homemade pest-repelling remedies and popular garden myths for deterring snails, there are no scientific studies to back up the claim that baby powder can protect your plants, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence from gardeners who have tested the theory. So, if you already have a bottle of baby powder in your bathroom, why not give it a try? You've got nothing to lose, except perhaps your snail problem.

The idea behind using baby powder as a barrier is that the snails are going to find the dry powder quite uncomfortable to glide over. In addition, once they get it on their bodies, it's going to dry out the natural secretion or mucus these pests use to make movement easy. While you could use other types of powdery substances, like flour, bran, or wood ash, baby powder is especially fine and likely to stick to the snails in clumps, making movement very slow and laborious.

What you want to do is sprinkle the fine powder around your plants in a ring that's around 1 inch wide. You can do this around each plant, but it's also an option to create an impenetrable "fence" around your entire garden bed where you've just planted your seedlings. Make sure there aren't any gaps in your defense strategy and reapply regularly, especially after it has rained. Adding some garlic powder to the mix to use around your most precious plants can also give things an added boost, as snails don't like the smell of garlic. At the end of the day, the key to preventing snails from invading your garden is to make your yard less appealing to them, and using a baby powder barrier might just help.