9 ways to eliminate slugs and snails from your garden

Slugs and snails are the culprits if you find leaves filled with holes that have clean edges, often with a shiny trail of slime left behind. Here are some ways to keep them out of your garden.

• Spread sawdust, wood ashes, crumbled eggshells or diatomaceous earth around plants to keep them away. Strips of gritty sandpaper also work.
• To stop slugs and snails from getting into your potted plants, put used sanding disks under the bases of your pots. Just make sure the sandpaper is wider than the pot base.

• Spray leftover coffee onto plants that are being bothered by slugs or snails.

Mollusks are easily poisoned by caffeine, which enters their bodies as soon as the coffee touches them.

• Make a trap by propping an upside-down flowerpot up on one side and putting a piece of orange or grapefruit rind inside in the evening.

The next morning, you'll find the critters inside. Use upturned half-grapefruit rinds as lethal traps before discarding them. Slugs will use them as shelter, making them easy to gather up.

• Set out a margarine tub so the rim is at soil level and pour in 2.5 centimetres (one inch) of stale beer.
• Slugs and snails will crawl in and drown. Dump the container and add new beer every day.

Hair is horrible as far as slugs are concerned.

• Save hair from hairbrushes or pet combs and place it beneath plants being damaged by slugs.

Slugs and snails are nocturnal.

• After dark, hunt in their favourite feeding places, armed with a flashlight and a saltshaker or a bucket of salty water. Salted slugs and snails don't survive.
• Or spray them with a 50:50 solution of ammonia and water.

Snails and slugs won't crawl across copper; it gives them a slight electrical shock.

• Attach copper strips eight centimetres wide to stakes to create a barrier around a flower bed or glue them to the sides of a planter.

The one good thing about crabgrass is that it's poisonous to slugs.

• If you have a patch, gather some of the leaves (without seeds), chop them into pieces and dry them for a few days.
• When you need slug bait, mix the dried leaves with some cornmeal and beer and place the "crabgrass cookies" where slugs will be sure to find them.

Plants that are reputed to repel snails include azaleas, apricots, basil, beans, California poppies, corn, chard, daffodils, fennel, fuchsias, grapes, ginger, holly, parsley, Peruvian lilies, pumpkins, plums, rhododendrons, rhubarb, sage and Swedish ivy.