Keeping slugs off vulnerable plants

How to do it

1. 1Concentrate on the few plants that actually get eaten — Hosta, Dahlia, Delphinium, lettuce, fresh bedding — rather than treating the whole garden.
2. 2Go out with a torch on the first mild, damp evenings of spring. An hour then is worth a month of anything else, because it removes the generation that is about to breed.
3. 3Water nematodes (Phasmarhabditis) onto damp soil once it is reliably above 5°C, for the plants you mind most; they work below ground, where pellets never reach.
4. 4Use wildlife-safe ferric phosphate pellets thinly as a fallback — a dozen scattered around a plant, not a ring of them.
5. 5Water in the morning rather than the evening, so the ground is drier by the time the slugs come out.

Plants that use it

Their calendar has a job that points to this guide.