It’s that time of year when slugs are back in a big way, with each rainfall bringing hordes of slugs and snails inching across driveways and into the cracks of our houses.
People with older houses especially have been unfortunate enough to find the slimy molluscs in their kitchens, along skirting boards or in porches.
Mrs Hinch fans, in their endless ingenuity, recently shared a tip to use salt to keep them away. But there’s actually an even cheaper – completely free – way, in fact, to keep slugs out of your house and out of any of your garden flowerbeds or furniture too.
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This is an genius tip passed down to me by my late dad, who was a keen gardener, but I’ve no doubt it’s been used by countless gardeners over the years.
And it’s completely free because you’ll be eating this fridge staple anyway, and discarding the waste otherwise.
Simply put: if you’re eating eggs, be they boiled, scrambled, fried, poached, whatever, keep the egg shells.
Then crush these egg shells until they are in flakes, and simply sprinkle the eggshell around the outside of your house. If you sprinkle them along the outer edge of your home, where slugs might normally get in, they won’t be able to enter any more.
(Image: Getty)
This is because to a soft, squashy slug, a piece of eggshell is very uncomfortable. They won’t be able to pass over the eggshell and be forced to turn around.
You can also sprinkle crushed eggshell over garden flowerbeds, around the edge of driveways, along greenhouses and basically anywhere you want to keep slugs and snails away.
One huge advantage over salt is that egg shell is completely cruelty free. The shell won’t kill the slugs, it simply turns them around so they go back the other way to avoid it. Salt, by contrast, is a very cruel torture for a slug, killing them in slow agony, often described as like experiencing a full-body migraine as all the moisture is forced out of the body at once.
The other huge advantage is that this method is free. You’re going to eat the eggs anyway, so you’re just making use of waste that would otherwise be thrown away.
Finally, it’s green and environmentally friendly. Salt is damaging to soil and can prevent anything from growing. It’s also dangerous for worms and other important creatures, so sprinkling salt around simply damages your garden. Eggshell doesn’t, and it eventually rots away and returns its minerals to the ground. When that happens you can simply sprinkle some more.
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