Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:58 pm
You'd should all be adopting hedgehogs. They'll sort out your slug problems (and the population is plummeting!!)
I'd love to but we don't appear to have any hedgehogs to adopt. We have a pretty wildlife friendly garden* and we're not very far at all from a meadow with lots of wildlife but I haven't seen a hedgehog for years
Foxes a-plenty and from time to time signs of badger visits but nary a hedgehog.
IvanV wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:48 pm
The trouble with them is that they are too soluble, and completely disappear during any moderately wet spell. Especially if you have any mollusc-asparagus (what I call any plant particularly attractive to molluscs), then any brief interval in protection during a wet spell and you can be done for. I regularly treated my toad lilies (Tricyrtis) this spring, but the snails managed to get in to completely eat them during brief intervals when the rain had done its job. And so I have no toad lilies, once again.
This is true - they do disappear after a soggy spell. I generally don't mind letting the slugs have a bit of a munch, though, as long as they don't kill my plants entirely, or eat so much of the lettuces that they're not worth picking. So I find that if I'm liberal with the slug pellets when I plant out, and make sure to top up after a lot of rain while they're still small then once they're reasonably established, I can pretty much let things be. That said, I wouldn't attempt to grow plants that are both intended to have attractive foliage and are (stealing your excellent phrase) mollusc-asparagus. I've never tried to grow toad lilies but I'll add them to my don't-bother list, along with hostas and a few other things. I do like a pot or two of marigolds in the summer and those are also mollusc-asparagus, but as they're mostly about the flowers, I can usually keep the leaf damage down to an acceptable level, as long as I am liberal with the slug pellets when I first plant them up.
*We're not lazy gardeners, oh no, it's all for the wildlife.