Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

how long should i flood my beds to get rid of ants spiders and slugs

We used to put Vaseline around the legs of the stand as well to help stop the ants. Dunno about how long to flood for, unfortunately most things go up the plants and then back down again later. I'd highly recommend beer traps for slugs, they work a treat...

How do you make your beer traps??

we use a 90mm storm water pipe cap, upside down sitting on the media.. A saucer will do, anything you can get enough beer into so that they will drown, and the slugs will appear quite quickly once they smell the beer...

Tried one of those a few nights ago but didn't catch anything.. Might not have been deep enough after reading this.. or they didn't like the sharp edge on the container I used and wouldn't crawl in.. or, and I suspect this might be the problem, budweiser isn't real beer..

Beer traps never worked for me, possibly because there was never any spare beer to put in them

I left a heap of stones sticking out of the water all the slugs went to it and we just picked them out and fed them to the fish I had the beds flooded for 6hrs no more slugs moving and no sign of any ants I'll flood again in a day or two and see what comes out

Im interested in this also..

..are ants and spiders worth worrying about? I have a major infestation of both in one of my beds. I assumed they would be ok cause they prob wont affect the beds but they may attack the other nasties like affids etc?

Dunno about spiders, but ants can farm aphids, many posts on this forum about that.
They can bring aphids in to attack your plants.
Ants, though totally amazing dudes are a pain in the proverbial bum.

I planted a load of seeds in my system in Surin only to find ants marching over the GB carrying the seeds with them
IIRC only 1 seed of that batch germinated, the rest stolen by ants.
I manually flood my GB's from time to time to discourage the little buggers, only for a few minutes though.
They are incredibly resourceful in finding new sources of food and places to live. but it doesn't take long to get rid of them in the short term, they will of course, return soon though.

Well you want beneficial bugs like spiders (we don't have really deadly ones around my area). So I just make sure to wear gloves when picking.