Last weekend we finally managed to get our hands on some ammonia. You actually have to buy it at the pharmacy here and they actually had to order it for me which was almost amusing. Turned out to be €11 for 1 liter which is a whole lot more than you’d pay at in the U.S. but what can you do? Not exactly something they’ll let you ship over here and judging by the smell I think the stuff we have is a LOT stronger than its American counterpart.

I wanted the ammonia because I was told by my mom that you can spray ammonia on slugs and they will die. This seems like a much nicer solution than picking them off by hand (gloved preferably) and disposing of them in soapy water or sprinkling them with salt since it’s not always easy to get the salt on them and I don’t want it all in my plants. But ammonia can actually be sprayed on your plants (although it generally will evaporate off and won’t continue to deter slugs) and will provide a source of nitrogen to your plants when sprayed in the soil.

Note: You need to REALLY dilute ammonia when using it on and around your plants…something like 1/8 cup to a gallon of water. But to kill slugs, they suggest using a 1:1 solution of ammonia and water. Don’t be stupid like me and put this on your plants…the results will NOT be pretty!!

This morning I did my first killing spree in the greenhouse with the ammonia and I have to say it works incredibly well. Those little suckers have been devouring our plants in the greenhouse but it was very cool and moist this morning and I managed to find about 10 large slugs in various corners of the structure. I sprayed them all down and made sure they were oozing before I moved on. I basically sprayed most of the leaves of each plant just to make sure I didn’t miss any slugs that might be hiding from me somewhere and got the soil as well.

I imagine I will need to continue this practice over the next few mornings. Surprisingly there weren’t too many in the garden itself but I guess they figure feeding on the luscious, fresh plants in the greenhouse is way better than the weeds growing everywhere else. This is the primary reason why we will also not be growing any lettuce outside in the garden this year. We bought 9 lettuce plants over the past weekend and have them sitting waiting to be potted in one of our window boxes. I’m not prepared to go through what we went through earlier this year with the slugs eating everything from the lettuce plants before they could even start growing so we said we will put them in the window boxes outside along the courtyard side of the house and see how that goes. At the moment we have nice mild temperature and the lettuce are loving it so I think they should flourish when we get them into planters this weekend. We already decided we won’t be putting flowers in there at this late stage anyway so at least this way we will be using the planters for something and always have fresh lettuce nearby!