We’re at war everyone.
We’re at war with the slugs and snails which are eating our beloved garden plants.
Around a month back we, rather reluctantly and with great hesitation, decided to liven up the garden with some greenery. Now neither of us are very green-fingered so armed with advice from David’s mum, our landscape gardener next door neighbor Colin (thanks Colin if you’re reading) as well as some handy tips from Google, we bought some plants, some compost and potted away.
It was all going so swimmingly. The leaves were green, the seeds were sewn and some little flowers even started to bloom, until one day (imagine it’s overcast and the sky is grumbling with anger – it makes it much more atmospheric) we came out and noticed that the leaves had been nibbled and the flowers looked glum.
On closer inspection we found the culprits, hoards of snails, basking in the moist soil chomping away at our handy work. However, not one’s to back-down we looked for solutions.
First we went with something a little more eco-friendly and tried copper tape.
Ours we purchased from Wilko and you can find it here. The tape supposedly gives off a small electrical charge when the critters touch it causing them to retreat however we didn’t find that to be the case as the little blighters still made it over. The tape also is quite hard to tape around a round pot and actually looks quite messy – and there’s us thinking this would be an eco solution AND would be bang on trend!
So with that, we took harsher action and went for the big guns.
We went for Bayer Garden’s Slug & Snail Killer which we grabbed from Sainsbury’s. Now the main reason we didn’t go straight for pellets in the first place was mainly because of our cat Kiki but she’s not one to put her nose in to our plants anyway and we don’t think bright blue pills are really her thing, so with that we gave it a go.
The pellets definitely seemed to have worked – hallelujah! Just a small scatter has kept the snails away. Some, unfortunately, we found in a bad way (shriveled and acid green) so they’re in a pile next to the pots as a warning to all the others out there.
The good thing about the pellets is that they can be scattered on both non-edible and edible plants meaning our parsley which we’re growing won’t be affected.
Our tip for anyone else with this problem – go straight for the pellets, they’re much more effective, both in cost and solution.
Now look at our plants…
Looks like we won!
David & Mark x
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