That time of year again – you’ve planted out all your tender young vegetables into the garden and the elements and wildlife are wrecking them. Hail is shredding leaves, wind is blowing the beans and peas flat and anything left over is being eaten by the slugs.

To be honest there isn’t much you can do about the weather damage. Pick up the plants carefully, firm them well down in the soil to make their roots secure, put the supports back into the ground – and maybe add a few more. Water them back in well and maybe give them a bit of a feed with well diluted liquid seaweed which helps to harden them up.

If you haven’t put out things like runner beans, courgettes and sweet corn yet there’s still plenty of time. In fact there’s still time to sow them out of doors and get a crop. In the days before polytunnels the last week in May was always the right time to sow these tender crops. Sow two seeds where you want them to come up and cover them with an upturned jam jar, pushing it down into the soil an inch or so for stability and to keep the slugs out. It will help to make a warm microclimate to get them germinated quickly and off to a good start.

And now to those slugs.

On the whole there are less than usual this year. The cold killed a lot during the winter and the dry weather recently hasn’t been good to them either, but those tender seedlings are still proving irresistible to the survivors.

I heard a sad story this morning of a dog that earlier this week had gone out into the field behind his owner’s house and eaten slug pellets. He died in agony before they could get him to a vet. Please don’t use them.

So what can you do? Start with garden hygiene. Slugs need dark, damp places to hide in during the day – tidy up and reduce the number of hiding places. Make sure you have lots of good dense shrubs and hedges for blackbirds and thrushes to nest in and they’ll eat the slugs and snails for you. Keep ducks. They lay as many eggs as hens and eat slugs as well, and on the whole they don’t eat the plants. (Hens eat less slugs and more plants.) Put up barriers – copper rings around favourite plants, copper tape at the edge of raised beds. Scatter crushed eggshells, or horticultural grit around favourite plants – they don’t like to ooze over sharp surfaces.

But the best way I’ve found to lower numbers is simply constant monitoring. Walk around your garden at evening when they come out of hiding with a bucket and collect them – escort them off the premises or use whatever other solution appeals to you. Pick up pots and buckets and remove them from their hidey holes. its surprising how quickly you can get the numbers down.

But don’t use those slug pellets – it might be your own pet next time