Tips for ridding your garden of slugs!

Slugs are an absolute pest! Munching through the new growth on your precious plants and demolishing seedlings overnight!🌱😕

They are active for most of the year but are particularly troublesome in spring when there's plenty of young tender growth to eat! They come out mainly after dark - especially when it's warm and moist.

There are over 40 species of slugs in the UK!

Despite your best efforts, some losses to slugs are inevitable - accept that your garden is never going to be free of slugs and try to find ways to work around this.

Sow extra seeds so that you have seedlings waiting in the wings to replace any losses. When sowing seeds in pots, place fabric or mesh under the pot so that slugs can't gain entry from underneath! Add plenty of slug resistant plants to keep damage to a minimum.

The best way to control slugs is to create a healthy ecosystem, create lots of habitats for slug predators - hedges, shrubs and trees will all attract birds such as thrushes and blackbirds which eat slugs and snails.

Healthy soil produces healthy plants which are much more able to withstand slug damage - they tend to attack plants that are already weakened in some way, so mulch your garden with good compost.

Encourage wildlife into your garden by creating a small hole in a fence, so that hedgehogs, toads and frogs can travel freely between yours and neighbouring gardens - create a leaf or log pile where they can live - they also love slugs!

These are just a few tips - good luck!