The Good Slug Guide How to Tackle the Slugs and Snails in Your Garden and Help Save the Planet

About this book

Slugs and snails exasperate gardeners everywhere. The only effective chemical control has been banned, and its replacement is still relatively untested and has its own environmental issues. And now the RHS says that we should treat slugs and snails as 'garden visitors'. What is going on?

The Good Slug Guide explains why conventional controls often fail, what slugs and snails really get up to in our gardens, what they really eat, what eats them, and includes many practical tips on how to reduce the damage done by pesky molluscs.

Prepare for surprises. Slug pellets probably help rather than hinder real nasties. The usual advice of 'keep the garden neat and tidy' can make things worse, and the organic advice to 'encourage hedgehogs, frogs and toads' turns out to be mostly wrong. Instead, there are more than 70 garden friends who are natural enemies of slugs and snails, ranging from mammal to microbe. There are even a few useful predatory slugs and snails.

Laid out in an easy-to-follow manner with sound, practical advice on how to achieve a resilient garden, this timely book will change the way you think about your garden – and your slugs!

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jo Kirby is a retired academic and lifelong gardener who is passionate about the environment. His family were commercial growers who used pesticides and other grim methods of pest control routinely. By the 1990s, it was clear that chemical use in horticulture and agriculture was causing a decline in flora and fauna, polluting the planet and harming a whole range of species, not just the intended victims. At college, Jo became interested in environmental toxicology and went on to do post-doctoral research in the ecology of decomposing plant matter before returning to the family business. Jo has undertaken a 30-year quest to understand the ecological processes at work in gardens, and how they might be adapted and used to help create beautiful places in which pests could never become a major issue.