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This Week’s Guest Blogger is Andrew Sinden, a plantaholic who runs his own business Andrew Sinden Gardening

Snail-proof Gardening

Visitors to my garden often point out snails and slugs and ask what I do to control them. I express concern that they are not getting enough food so they must be moving on to somewhere else in search of food.

The reality is that I don’t have any food plants for slugs so I don’t ever look to control them. Every evening or wet day I see hundreds of them climbing up the walls, presumably to escape.

I’m not one of those garden Nazis who spend hours of negative time in the garden finding irritants at the sight of slugs only to cut them in half using secateurs as a weapon. Treating any wildlife with such elitism shows no understanding of what happens in a garden.

Surely it’s better to see things from a different angle and think about the problem properly rather than chasing loose ends for the rest of your life. With good garden knowledge you can give up worrying about slugs and all the other pests and diseases to boot.

A while ago I planted a sumptuous Lupin plant from one of my favourite nurseries and each evening snails would dine out on my £3.50 bill which fed 29 of them. It looked like a completely overladen Christmas tree with 29 giant baubles of huge snails!

If you want to put your snails and slugs on a diet, here’s a list of plants that will only get nibbled in the most drought conditions.

• Tulipa whittallii

• Catananche caerulea

• Globularia cordifolia

• Gladiolus tristis

• Ferula communis

• Melianthus major

• Digitalis mertonensis

All Euphorbias and most grasses

http://www.andrewsinden.com

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