You raise a tray of seedlings, plant them out with pride, and overnight the slugs reduce them to bare stalks. It is the gardener's oldest battle. You will never win it outright, but you can tip the odds firmly in your favour without reaching for the blue pellets.
Protect the vulnerable moment
Slugs do the worst damage to young, soft growth. Established plants usually shrug them off, so the effort is best spent guarding seedlings and tender new transplants through their first few weeks until they toughen up.
Barriers and traps
A combination of tactics works better than relying on any one.
- Ring precious plants with sharp grit, crushed shell or copper tape.
- Sink a beer trap to draw them away from the crops.
- Go out after dark with a torch and collect them by hand.
Encourage the predators
The best long-term answer is a garden full of things that eat slugs: frogs, toads, hedgehogs, ground beetles and thrushes. A pond, a log pile and a gap under the fence for a hedgehog do more over a season than any amount of pellets.
Nematodes for the worst spots
For a bed under serious attack, biological control offers microscopic nematodes you water onto the soil, which kill slugs underground and are harmless to everything else. They are not cheap, but on a hosta bed or a row of lettuces they can be worth every penny.