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Slugs can be the bane of any gardeners life, with their penchant for eating away at most leaves that they can find, as well as leaving trails of slime wherever they go.Many of the conventional poisons designed to keep slugs away tend to be toxic, and are often dangerous to other wildlife as well as pets such as cats or dogs. Fortunately however, there are many easy non-toxic ways to remove slugs from your garden and away from your plants.

The first method, and perhaps the oldest, is simply to keep half a glass of beer in the garden somewhere. Slugs for some reason love the taste of beer, and will head straight towards it even over fresh leaves. Beer has the same effect on slugs as it has on people however, and having drunk as much as they can, they become so inebriated that they fall straight into the glass where they quickly drown. The best place to leave the glass is somewhere fairly low down, where the slugs can easily find it and climb the side of the glass.

Depending on the weather conditions as well as your garden type, simply putting out lines of salt is often an effective way of keeping slugs at bay. As we all know salt melts slugs, and as such they cannot cross a line of salt. If the weather conditions are damp but not wet, then putting a line of salt between your plants and any other surface type is usually effective in keeping slugs away. And the best thing about this is that salt is relatively cheap, as well as not being harmful to other wildlife, young children or pets that might come into contact with it.

Rather than having to kill the slugs, another way to prevent their damage is simply to stop them getting near your plants. This can be done in a number of ways, including manufactured products that repel slugs that can be obtained from garden centers. One of the more effective ways to keep them away however is to use crushed egg shells, which they cannot cross. Simply take a few egg shells and crush them down into small pieces then place them wherever you want the slugs to keep away from. The sharp pieces and unusual surface to the pieces prevent the slugs from crossing them, and keeps your plants safe.

Another seemingly obscure item that slugs are affected by is human hair, which they dislike traveling across. The reason is probably as simple as that hair sticks to them and slows them down, as well as eventually drying them out. So putting hair clippings around particularly vunerable plants that you don't want eaten should. Be warned however, that

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