Pass the Salt

I try to live my life by the good book (Alan Titchmarsh - How To Be A Gardener Volume One). I keep my plot free of debris, I prune my lowest branches and I rake my mulch. So why oh why does the Good Lord send me slugs? They are making my life a misery. I can't keep throwing them over the garden wall - my neighbours are back from their holiday. But to see my very own Eden being eaten away makes me wail and gnash my teeth.

It used to be so easy - table salt. Remember that scene from The Wizard of Oz? The one where the witch melts? That's what happens when you tip salt on slugs. Then, of course, there were slug pellets. I didn't care if they attacked the slug's nervous system with metaldehyde. Or that scientists were busily researching how MS and ME were linked to our use of pesticides. Why should I? My new-season lupins had never looked better.

Then I married an interfering woman. And had to listen to her eco-claptrap. "Let's consider what slugs actually do" she would say. "They feast on decayed vegetable matter. Which is good. And they are part of the food chain. Which is also good. Slugs are our friends." By the time she got to the bit about how "a pest is just an organism in the wrong place at the wrong time", I had blacked out. She had obviously never tried growing lupins.

According to her hastily re-written marriage vows, I was only allowed to use animal-friendly slug pellets. Unfortunately, animal-friendly slug pellets are also slug-friendly slug pellets. You can buy them most places you can buy cornflakes - and they are just about as effective. My wife volunteered to collect the slugs by hand and release them in the village where her parents live. Until, one day, she met the vicar. "We don't want your townie slugs" he said. "Please take them home with you." Damnation.

She still couldn't bring herself to kill them. In her eyes, it would be like killing one of the family. After all, slugs have blood. And kidneys. They even have a place they like to call 'home'. I don't begrudge them a 'home' - as long as it's not in my lupins. Their main defence is that they taste nasty. And, if they get caught, they drop their tails and slither away. That was when I lost any residual sympathy for slugs. Live and let live just was not an option.

So now I'm exploring other ideas. Any other ideas - like Margaret Drabble says, "Where nothing is sure, everything is possible." As a concession, I have thrown away my slug pellets. Now I'm thinking of scattering hair - human hair - around my most important plants. The slugs don't like the feel of it, and it sticks to their bodies. Which can be funny. But slugs which look like handlebar moustaches don't really help with the 'English country garden' look I'm trying to create.

But hair does work. Paul, a friend with a big garden and a little hair was driven to approaching his local hairdressers in Bournemouth. "I knew it would sound a bit weird - 'Can I have a bag of hair please? And do you mind if I sort through it, because anything with dye in will poison my soil?' - so I got my Mum to ask. Well, she had an appointment at the salon anyway. Anyway, for the first time ever, my canna has just produced a leaf that doesn't resemble a paper doiley."

Slugs slide along on a muscular "foot" that secretes mucus. The slime absorbs water, keeping them moist - slugs never quite left the sea, you see. That's why you can't wash the stuff off your hands; you have to rub it off like modelling glue after a self-assembly Hawker Hurricane. The slime protects slugs so well that they can crawl unharmed along the edge of a razor blade. But there are other things they find more difficult to negotiate. Like eggshells, lime and sawdust. And Paul's hair.

I'm dotting my flowerbeds with jam-jars full of beer - slugs, apparently, can't resist the yeasty smell. But the traps are labour intensive. They need topping up in warm weather. And the beer needs changing - a mix of rotting slug and stale yeast produces a topnote that's difficult to describe. Also, it galls me to think that not only am I providing dinner, I'm also providing the beer to wash it down with. It might be more satisfying to drink the beer myself, until I forget about my snails altogether.

And there are other drawbacks. Beer traps only attract slugs within a one-metre circumference. So I've also set grapefruit traps and bran traps. Slugs will eat bran before anything else - even my lupins. The bran swells inside them, and then they explode. A garden full of self-destructing slugs? I hope I live to see it. I don't mean to sound gleeful, but there is something willful about the way a slug chews on your plants. It's vandalism. And that justifies my glee.

My wife wants me to be a green gardener. So she was delighted to find that our garden is visited by a tame blackbird who loves to breakfast on slugs. She hopes it's genetic, and that the bird breeds well this year. But one bird isn't enough. You know those 5,000 hedgehogs from the Outer Hebrides? We have offered to re-home them all. In one night a hedgehog can consume its entire body weight in food - in my garden they need never go hungry again.

I'm training up my bulldog just in case. This may sound a little obsessive, but I like to water the soil in the late afternoon just to draw the slugs out. Then, when it's dark, Martha and I go on a torchlit search-and-destroy mission. So far, she has only shown interest in the slugs which look most like sausages. That's when she found out that slugs are a natural anaesthetic. She licked one and her tongue went numb - which is why Native Americans used to suck on slugs when they had toothache.

I have finally managed to committ a list of slug-eating creatures to memory. Which is why I'm going to build a pond to encourage frogs and toads, I'm going to plant a fruit-bearing shrub to encourage more birds, and I'm going to sew a grass path to encourage beetles and centipedes. By the time I'm finished, there will be no room for the garden furniture. But I will be prepared, and do whatever it takes. You don't fight this war on your own - you bring back-up.

One friend recruited her two-year-old son to run regular slug raids. "My salvia had just flowered for the first time when I heard a scream from the garden" says Nicky. "It was Myles, distraught at the damage the slugs were doing. I was busy, so I said 'Throw salt on them'. We both got a real sense of revenge. But then I worried that slugs might feel pain, so I explained that hurting a creature is never a good thing. Now we use traps instead. He comes running in yelling 'Slugs in the beer mum!'."

Yadda yadda yadda. I still vote for salt - no bodies. But then I have to listen to my wife's childhood stories about slugs, writhing around, turning themselves inside out with pain. When gardeners apply salt to slugs, they are actually setting in train a process called exosmosis. Water is moving from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration through a semi-permeable membrane - the slug's cell walls. And it's not pretty to look at.

But is it painful? The slug is certainly the most innervated of all the invertebrates. And it has a brain - of sorts. "A slug does have the sensory system necessary for responding to a change in its environment" says Dr Eric Chudler from the Department of Anaesthesiology, University of Washington. "Which is why it curls up if you touch it. But it doesn't have a cerebral cortex - and that's the part of the brain responsible for the conscious perception of pain." I reckon that's a 'No'.

So I won't worry about salting a slug - or chopping it in two with my hoe. "Because a slug responds to a stimulus we think is painful doesn't mean it's experiencing pain" says Dr Chudler. "A person who is anaesthetized, ready for surgery, may still pull his hand away when he's pinched. He's just pulling his hand away because of the flexion reflex - and that comes from the spinal cord. It's got nothing to do with pain. But we still don't know exactly what the slug feels."

Speaking for a moment as a gardener - and not a slug hater - salt does need to be used with care. It increases the soil salinity, which isn't good for plants. I am learning a lot of science since the slugs arrived. I even took delivery of a cardboard box of nematodes (Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita). These parasites came Special Delivery in a plastic tray - rather like a takeaway chicken korma. The parasites work by laying their eggs in the slugs, killing them in time for their life cycle to continue.

I sprinkled the nematodes on my garden on Monday. On Tuesday, after I read a report in Nature magazine, I was also feeding my plants 'hangover strength' coffee. Double-strength instant, apparently, makes slugs lose their appetite. But a 2% concentration of caffeine disrupts the slugs' nervous system enough to kill them. Or else they get so crabby they just pack up and go live somewhere else. Nobody knows exactly, but I'm beyond caring.

So far, all my efforts are failing. Take my lupins - or what's left of them. I planted them in high-walled pots, collared in copper. The metal was meant to be uncomfortable for the slugs. The copper was meant to react with slime, causing a flow of electricity and sending the slugs slithering away. But there's nothing left of my lupins. So how the hell did the slugs get in? By parachute? Now I'm mad. You plough the field and scatter, and see how it feels.

The result is that my garden isn't a garden any more. It's one giant slug trap. And I'm already saving for a SlugBot. This device navigates the garden using a Global Positioning Satellite. Which makes it better equipped than my Volvo. It picks up slugs with a long arm and drops them into an on-board hopper the size of a two-litre ice cream container. It then uses the bodies to generate enough electricity to go find some more. On a good day (well, night) SlugBot can hunt down over 100 slugs in an hour.

It pains me to tell you that SlugBots aren't commercially available. Not yet. And their pricetag will eventually make them more suitable for large-scale agribusiness than small-scale town gardening. But in years to come you'll see them advertised in the Sunday supplements. And that will reduce the need for molluscicides - the harmful pesticides that kill slugs and snails, and then seep into the ground water. My wife will be pleased.

Until then, I will raise my garden beds. That way, the soil surface will dry out more quickly after rain, making it a less attractive place for slugs to call 'home'. Next year I will choose my plants more carefully, avoiding campanula carpatica, delphinium, gentian, hosta, lettuce, lilies, mustard greens, petunias, marigolds, primroses, strawberries, and trillium. And this is the short list - bastard slugs, it seems to me, will eat anything you don 't want them to.

I know they don't like salad plants with red leaves. But then neither do I. So that's no use. And they don't like hot plants. So this year I'm going to grow mustard, raddichio and rocket in my vegetable patch. I hope to have more success than I had with the lettuce I grew last year. It disappeared overnight. It was like I had been visited by the giant slugs of Seattle. They grow up to six inches long. Imagine the mess that one of those would make on the bottom of your shoe.

Despite my anti-slug measures, I am still reduced to throwing them over the garden fence - residents of Seattle must recruit a friend to help. But resistance is futile. According to research, 60% of them will 'home' anyway. Albeit very, very slowly. I know I won't win overnight - after all, slugs can live up to six years. But one day I will make progress. Gardening is the closest I come to Creation, and I'm not going to give up my inner Zen in a hurry. In some parts of the world, human beings eat slugs. If it keeps numbers down, hey, I'm not ruling it out.