For many people April is a time of planting seeds and buying young plants for the garden. Unfortunately, garden pests such as snugs and snails, who just love their spring greens in the form of juicy young seedlings, will magically appear from nowhere to ravage your garden. In the UK there are 30 slug species but 95% live underground and are rarely seen, whilst only four species really cause any damage to plants. There are about 110 snail species but again very few live in gardens and only small numbers cause problems.

The garden’s natural vacuum cleaner

So before you rush for the slug pellets take a moment to look around your neighbourhood – how many gardens can you see? Imagine the impact if every garden becomes a toxic zone full of poisoned slugs and snails, which in turn will poison frogs, toads, hedgehogs, blackbirds, thrushes, beetles and all the other wildlife that feed on them.

Slugs and snails do actually serve a useful purpose. They are the garden’s natural vacuum cleaner, munching their way through fallen and rotting plant debris, fungi and other garden rubbish. They are also food for a host of other wildlife mentioned above. So rather than reaching for the poison, why not look at better and safer ways of managing them?

The first thing to bear in mind is that they need moisture, which is why they mostly appear in wet weather and at night. Dehydration will kill them so they spend daytime hours hiding in cool damp places around the garden.

Working with these molluscs is one option. Planting extra seeds or seedlings to allow for a few losses will still leave your garden looking lovely. Allowing plants to grow a bit bigger before planting out will enable them to survive otherwise fatal leaf and stem attacks.

Anywhere cool and damp will be a haven for them

Creating a mollusc friendly area will quickly attract them. A paving slab put down, a sack of leaves composting in a corner, a stack of flowerpots, an area of dense plant growth – basically, anywhere cool and damp will be a haven for them. By controlling where slugs and snails will be you then create options.

Collect them daily and relocate them or humanely destroy them, or feed them bran, which ironically leaves them bloated and ‘sluggish’ making them easy prey for their predators. Alternatively you could make or buy a beer-trap so at least they drown happy!

Control them – it’s so much better than harming our already hard-hit wildlife

The other option is to make your garden unappealing to them. Remembering they eat debris and like cool damp places, simply remove these attractive areas from your garden. Keep the soil free of fallen plant debris and other rubbish – even large pebbles provide cool damp shelter. Put down a mulch of wood chippings, scatter broken eggshells or spread coffee grounds around vulnerable plants. If you have a lot of potted plants, raise the pots onto stands to keep the lovely cover-providing bases off the ground.

By exploring your garden in detail and learning where to find molluscs you will soon be able to control them, which is so much better than harming our already hard-hit wildlife.