Deirdre O Meara 
As spring approaches, gardeners are seeking ways to prevent slugs and snails from eating their crops without resorting to harmful pesticides. One gardener has shared a cost-effective solution that will cost you just £1.79. They suggest buying a honeydew melon, cutting it in half, and eating it while preserving the skin in two hemispheres. Place the melon skin in your garden near the crops, facing downwards like a dome. The next morning, lift the melon and you will find most of the slugs from your garden in it, as they prefer to eat melon rather than your crops. You can then move the melon far away, and voila! Your slug problem is solved.
In a Reddit discussion called “Best Ways to keep slugs and snails at bay this spring?” many gardeners shared their tips and tricks. One gardener suggested that if you create an environment that encourages wildlife, you will attract predators such as hedgehogs, slow worms, amphibians, and birds that will eat slugs. Slug pellets are being banned because they are an indiscriminate poison that harms other creatures up the food chain. It is important to avoid killing or eradicating the majority of good slugs, as they eat dead stuff and rotting wood, which is essential for the ecosystem. Leopard slugs, for example, eat crop-eating slugs, so it is important to keep them.
Other tips that use natural methods to get rid of slugs include putting up wool barriers or cracking eggshells on the soil, which slugs won’t want to cross. Copper tape also repels slugs and snails without harming them. It is essential to avoid using harmful pesticides that kill slugs and snails as they are an important food source for birds and other wildlife.
Bird populations in the UK are under threat, and they rely on slugs and snails as a food source. The decline in bird numbers is partly due to the lack of insects and slugs in urban environments where gardens are carefully managed and wildlife is stripped out and killed. Killing slugs and snails also affects the hedgehog population, which relies on slugs as part of their diet. Slug pellets containing a toxin called metaldehyde were banned from sale in the UK in 2021 because the toxin was also poisonous to birds that ate the slugs which had eaten the pellets. Even if you don’t use slug pellets, killing slugs with things like scissors, stamping, or beer traps is still contributing to the decline of bird species. This, in turn, damages the entire food chain at a time when the environment is in crisis.
It is important to accept that slugs and snails are part of the garden ecosystem and to create an environment that encourages wildlife. This will help to attract predators that will eat slugs and snails, rather than resorting to harmful pesticides. By doing so, gardeners can help to preserve the ecosystem and protect bird and hedgehog populations.
