A few points to mention here. Firstly, although I feed slugs and snails to my own chickens I'm aware that they harbour parasitic worms that complete their lifecycle in poultry guts. This is normal, but feeding slugs and snails to them on purpose might create higher parasite levels and make the birds ill, which means you should worm the birds two or three times a year.
Secondly, even using products like Nemasure have their drawbacks in an organic garden and should be used with care. The reason for this is that they are so successful (in small gardens anyway) that the slug numbers crash. This means that your slug-predator species will also be affected - beetles, toads etc may have to leave the garden to find food. This is a theoretical problem, and I'm not sure if it's practically important, but in theory six months to a year after drenching your garden with Nemasure you might actually find you have a big rise in slug population and so have to use the biocontrol again. And again.
I think it might be better to take a permaculture view of slugs and view them as part of the self-balancing system your garden can eventually become. There's a "but" to this, which I'll get to in a minute. Without intervention, the numbers of slugs are eventually limited by several factors including predator numbers, availability of habitat and availability of food. (Otherwise we'd all be knee-deep in slugs)
The habitats that favour slugs are longish grass and overgrown areas, and as other forum members have observed in other threads, cutting down on these habitats has a huge influence on slug numbers. You should also avoid growing non-food species that slugs like, such as hostas.
Slug predators include ground beetles, frogs and toads, thrushes and other small birds, hedgehogs etc -
there's a good list here along with their habitats but you're basically looking at wildlife gardening to bring them in, which needn't be drastic and is good for biodiversity all round.
The rider to this argument is that even with habitat adjustments there will of course still be some slug damage, so you need to defend susceptible food crops in humid weather. Using slug pellets is generally accepted to be a bad idea, but Digi mentioned something about a natural slug-repellant pellet a while ago. It took me a while to trace the damned thing, but finally I found a link to their website and you can buy the stuff online from a firm called
Slugs.biz - this is a pellet made with wood pulp from recycled pallets and myrrh resin, and you can read the testing and research online. Anyone prepared to try it and write an online review? I'll forward this to Digi - he was the one that raised this in the first place!
