A wet spring feels like a personal battle on my plot: me versus the slugs. But through trial and error I do know that some crops, locations, and sowing conditions are better for slugs than others.  It’s obvious that if I let the grass path overhang my rows of seeds, slugs have super easy access to dinner on damp evenings. So I try to keep the path edges cut right back. It’s also obvious that if I get over enthusiastic and plant seeds early when the soil is still wet and cold, seedlings will be slow and struggling and easy for slugs and snails to finish right off. When I’m planting out delicate seedlings that I’ve been nurturing first at home, I will protect them using beer traps made from old plastic bottles – not slug pellets. And after finding drowning beetles in my beer / cider traps, I now try to remember to put in a little grass stem for them to climb safely out on. Many common beetles actually eat slugs themselves, so the more beetles, the better!

Every year I wonder if I can successfully grow brassicas (the gardeners term for cabbages, kale, broccoli etc). Most years I realise it’s a no, when the pigeons have pecked at them, and masses of caterpillars of the large white butterfly have stripped any leaves left.

My solution is to create a tunnel of horticultural fleece and grow cabbage plants in there. I know from experience that if you leave even a tiny gap in the tunnel, say between the soil and the fleece material, the large white butterflies will find their way in and lay their eggs. As I open the tunnel up to let these butterflies fly out, I know that at best, I’m now sharing my cabbages with caterpillars, and probably, they have just won again. I used to grow a couple of cabbage plants to leave out for the butterflies, thinking they then might leave the others alone, but it just seemed to encourage more butterflies onto my plot.