Can you kill slugs and be eco friendly?

Some Buddhists, in their belief that all life is sacred, even wash their hands before they gather up slugs and snails because they worry that the salt on their hands will hurt them. When Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time asked listeners to submit their favourite ways of getting rid of slugs, Buddhist Robert Korner sent in a controversial list of 92 slug-resistant plants ( which included cornflower, scabious, snapdragons, honesty, tulips, creeping jenny and lavender.

But most gardeners have more bloodthirsty attitudes to slugs and snails. According to the inverterbrate ecologist Dr Bill Symondson, Britain is the slug capital of the world so it's no wonder we get a bit worked up. Slug pellets (usually cereal pellets containing metaldehyde which can be toxic for pets or methiocarb which is also an insecticide), however, are not really much good. Alright, so they may leave satisfyingly high piles of the buggers lying around, but some of those dead bodies will be consumed by birds, which takes the poison into the eco-system at large.

Try one of these six environmentally-friendly methods instead:

1 Gather them up by hand. Best done of an evening or just after rain. Dispose of them as you prefer.

2 Put barriers around vulnerable plants - suggestions include coffee grounds, broken eggshells, soot or sand. Must be strewn plentifully. Varied reports of effectiveness.

3 You can buy strips of copper to put around plant pots or stems. Believed to give the slug or snail a kind of electric shock.

4 Empty plastic bottles cut in half make a good cloche: you stick the bottom bit into the soil around young plants to protect them.

5 Nematodes are tiny organisms which are poisonous to slugs. You buy them in a packet, add them to water, and pour over the areas affected by slugs: they kill the slugs from inside, beneath the soil.

6 Beer traps: bury a pint glass so that it forms a sort of pit and fill it with beer. The slugs, according to legend, will dive in and drown tipsily and happily.