Time to slug it out with the hungry army arriving to feast on young veg and plants
As the days begin to get warmer, an army of slugs is waking up from hibernation, ready to nibble on fresh, young leaves.
Before these pesky molluscs have the chance to demolish tasty flower and vegetable seedlings, it’s important to put strong defences in place.
If you don’t then young lettuces and whole rows of bedding plants can disappear virtually overnight, with nothing left behind but a silvery trail of evidence as to the nature of the culprit.
One of the best ways of defeating slugs is to encourage birds into the garden and, in particular thrushes, which have a healthy appetite for them. But if the slug population in your garden is large then you can’t leave it to the birds to do all the work. You can, of course, use slug pellets. From this month only tablets containing ferric phosphate will be on sale as the old form of pellets, which contained metaldehyde, has now been banned and any you have left in the shed should be disposed of safely. Whether you want to use the new form of tablets, which work on the principle of giving slugs iron poisoning, is a matter of choice as there are still concerns about the risks these pose to children, mammals and birds.
It might be better to invest in a head torch and begin making nightly patrols of the garden, seeing off slugs when they appear after dark to feed. Other alternatives include setting beer traps, sprinkling gravel around plants to make them inaccessible or laying lengths of copper wire, which effectively give the slugs an electric shock when they try to cross it. The idea is not to banish slugs completely as this would remove an important food source for birds and small mammals, but instead to reduce the damage they cause.
If you want to hunt down slugs then begin by looking under pots and down the sides of raised beds. They lurk in dark and damp corners and you can often find a whole colony of them underneath a stone or behind the shed.
And they aren’t the sort of problem you can deal with once and then forget about. Tackling slugs regularly is the best way of keeping numbers down.