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I've heard that cooper is good for deteriring slugs but can I just use cooper piping or wire as the cooper tape I saw today is pretty expensive and I have some wire at home and can properly libertate some piping from some skip or another

I'm not sure how effective it is, although I know the HRDA organic gardens at Yalding near Maidstone were giving that (and other antislug techniques) a trial last year. Personally, I make reasonably frequent night time tours of the garden with a head torch, gloves and a sharp knife to do for any gastropods I find in my growing areas.

Wulf

My brocoli was being devastated by our little slimey friends so I tried copper pipe (I've just renovated my house so had plenty of old scraps. I read that old (green) copper works best.

Well anyway it seems to be working. The trails are leading up to the pipe and turning around.

I've just put out a beer trap as well and that's working very well too.

I have had excellent results with copper pipe as a barrier, but I too recommend getting out there and killing the slugs with a pair of scissors. It's rather therapeatic (spelling sucks I think)

How does the barrier solution work for slugs travelling through the soil rather than on top of it? Other things my enquiring mind would be interested to know are whether the copper has any effect on nearby plants and how you apply a barrier when you've gone for the potager affect (in my case an untidy riot of shrubs, flowers and food plants without many clearly defined boundaries).

Wulf

Garder's World, a programme that I very rarely watch, did a test on various anti-slug devices a few weeks ago, which included a circular collar of copper, maybe 3 inches wide and a foot in diameter, that you put round your plant, pushing it a couple of inches into the ground.

Obviously this is only useful for individual plants, and I've no idea if it worked, because I didn't see the followup. I can't even find any mention of it on the BBC gardening website.

I gather that Bill Oddie, during his Springwatch programmes, declared that black slugs don't harm our plants, it's all the brown and grey ones that do the damage. Never heard that before, but come to think of it, I did remove several black slugs from my radishes earlier this year, but there was never any trace of nibbling.

Alternatively, has anybody ever considered re-homing a hedgehog - http://www.cwgsy.net/private/hedgehogrescue/Uists.html

In my experience copper does work - but as you all have noticed, it's sometimes difficult to apply... The large rings that you can also push into the soil are pretty expensive, and the narrow tape will just be "undermined" by some types of slugs. What I was going to try out (if and when I get round to it... ) is using a ring of plastic (piece of old bucket or plant pot), push that into the ground and just stick the tape round the top of it. I'd still have to make sure there are no slugs trapped within the ring.

Ina