I often lose fights against nature – that’s why I love gardening

Eggshells aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Copper tape is a swizz. And as for the efficacy of wool pellets; let’s just say you’d be better off knitting your gerberas a poncho in order to ward off the slugs.

Research into traditional methods of combating garden gastropods has revealed that our five favourite homespun remedies – all of the above plus horticultural grit and pine-bark mulch – don’t work.

That’s a blow. So much so that had this verdict come from any less august body than the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) we might have labelled it (carefully, in 2B pencil, on a biodegradable lollipop stick) the fakest of fake news.

These findings, carried out on no fewer than 108 lettuces at the RHS John Macleod Field Research Facility in Wisley, are hard to ignore.

Hard, but not impossible. Here in the green-fingered brigade we remain sceptical of sweeping generalisations, fads and fancies.

Why? Because we know that no two plots of land are the same. Plants that flourish in one soil may struggle in another so it stands to reason that the behaviour of slugs and snails might be equally variable.

In my urban garden, a cairn of dog hair at the base of my dahlias successfully fends off nocturnal predators, unless there’s a wind, obviously. Eggshells work reasonably well for the sweet pea but are useless when it comes to the hosta plants.

And while beer traps are best, I use them sparingly on the grounds that wholesale slaughter of snails and slugs rather flies in the face of my efforts to nurture a wildlife haven in the city.

“A garden is a grand teacher,” wrote Gertrude Jekyll. “It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” Just as we trust in nature, so must we trust our instincts. Possibly even more than we trust the RHS, in this particular instance.

Gardening is not a science but an art and, for most of us, progress is measured in marginal gains achieved through a combination of ingenuity and luck.

I find there is a sweet pleasure to be had in beating the slugs to the season’s first crop of beans, fair and square. And if I don’t? Then so be it.

But that’s because I’m not entering them into my local flower and produce show; were I Bert Fry, Jill Archer or any other Ambridge resident intent on collecting a trophy I might be more systematic in guarding my precious crop – by whatever ostensibly crackpot means necessary.

In the words of Alfred Austin, the early 20th-century poet laureate: “There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.”

That’s why I, for one, will continue walking on eggshells, regardless of RHS advice.