"David in Normandy" wrote in message
r...
On 23/08/2010 17:23, Mentalguy2k8 wrote:


Did you find the pellets effective?


Personally I find slug pellets very effective. I hate using them though
but sometimes it seems necessary to bring out the "big guns" against the
slugs and snails. Once plants are beyond seedling stage I leave them too
it, but like to scatter slug pellets around seed trays. A fat slug or
snail can scoff an entire tray of emerging lettuce seedlings in one
sitting. :-(

Likewise, I really didn't want to kill them but I tried everything from
talking nicely to them to collecting them all and throwing them into the
local wooded areas. But I can't spend hours outside every night picking them
up, and it's not effective for slugs who only seem to eat my plants when I'm
indoors. One planter (measuring about 1 foot by 6 inches) with one of those
arrangements from the garden centre (a little conifer and a few pansies
round the edge) I spent an hour on the other morning and picked out *27*
tiny baby snails. Most of my garden is patio so I have to use pots for the
plants, I was picking them up every evening and putting them on tables, with
a special "quarantine" area for any plants that I found snails in. But as I
said, I've had enough now. Most of my stuff isn't going to stay in flower
much longer so I want to keep hold of what I've got.


There has been a lot of frogs and toads around this year, they seem to
have been helping to keep the population down in the garden. We've also
got lots of birds foraging between the plants, so hopefully they are
contributing to the control too.

We live quite near wooded areas, but we're just too far away to attract many
birds, they obviously get enough from the woods. I've never seen a hedgehog
here either, but we're pretty much all fenced in. Same for toads and frogs,
unless a bird happens to drop a creature overhead, we just don't get them.
Shame you can't buy hedgehogs at the pet shop