You eat my seedlings...I drown you in beer!

I'm slightly gutted this morning. I've been growing a lot of plants from seed. I popped them in the cold frame thinking that this would keep them safe from the birds who had dug up my spinach a few days earlier...nope. To be fair, it's not the birds now, they've settled down and left my seedlings alone, now it's slugs and I'm really getting annoyed. First they munched their way through a tray of fennel...then the slugs moved onto my rescued coriander plant - a sad supermarket plant.

At least they were relatively established plants, they're bound to come back with a little TLC, especially now I've smothered the gravel in egg shell and put copper rings around everything. Last night, I even put out beer traps to gently sozzle the slugs. (Well, if you're gonna kill them at least let them go out in a drunken haze). Except, no one touched it and instead of heading to the slug pub, they've eaten my lettuces. The top photo is them yesterday, and now all but about five left.

Now I'm off slug hunting!

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10 minutes later...

So I decided to start, quite logically, in the cold frame, especially in the old pots and crock pots I keep in the bottom....3 pots in, look who I found!

Three inches long, an inch wide, it's no wonder my veggies have been going the way they have given the size of this beast and the half dozen cronies it had in tow! In fact, I'm surprised how few things have been chomped!

They've now gone to the slug pub in the sky.

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Listening: Burl Ives - Ugly Bug Ball