Slugs and snails

For those unable to appreciate their charms it is helpful to explain that slugs and snails really do serve a useful part in the ecology of a garden by providing food for birds, toads and hedgehogs, and by recycling decaying plant material.

Using slug and snail granules is environmentally damaging. Hedgehogs would find the slugs a tasty meal, but sadly there are none in my garden due to the widespread use of slug and snail bait. The results of this thoughtless practice are a slow and unpleasant death for the slugs and snails and the provision of a lethal meal for hedgehogs, birds and frogs.

The much promoted use of parasitic nematodes causes a deep sense of revulsion in me. Introducing a parasite that will explode the body of its host is no longer science fiction but fact. It is a human engineered obscenity. Nature can be cruel, but I have no wish to introduce this method of death into my garden.

It is not worth relocating snails unless you can take them a really long way away. I once collected some snails and took them to a wild spot nearby, but they found their way back like homing pigeons... I tracked their progress with a few tippex-marked shells.

Some people resort to beer traps, cabbage leaves and other 'humane' systems of killing. Why do this when it is possible to protect plants from predation in gentler ways?

In the kitchen garden and around pot grown plants copper pipe, strips and tape is amazingly effective at keeping slugs and snails out.

I run copper plumbing pipe along the top of my raised bed wood edges, and make barrier rings by running copper tape around the edges of large bottomless flowerpots and sinking them into the ground. The tape is only effective for one growing season, but the copper pipe just needs a light sanding occasionally to keep it permanently working.

Garlic water is also a great deterrent. This needs to be applied frequently during the growing season, but it is worth the effort. Maybe it reminds them of how their French cousins Helix pomiata end their days.

For an in depth examination of chemical and cultural slug control methods I recomend the paper by Dr. Bill Symondson at the Cardiff School of Biosciences.