[andytk58]

So I have a 4 year old boy and we're growing peas to teach him about plants and where food comes from (and to try to get him to eat the bloomin things!)

Last year our entire plants were decimated by slugs and snails, so this year we got wise and put down copper tape.

But now something else is eating the plants! I cannot for the life of me figure it out, but what I know about gardening could be summarised on a napkin...
I've yet to catch the wee blighters in the act and it seems to eat the lower leaves first and works its way further up as time goes on, which would rule out a flying insect.

See images below:

Help! What is it?

Decent leaf for reference, the wee buggers haven't eaten them all!

[mick w]

It's Slugs ,I can see 6 of the blighters

[TheKentishFledgling]

My bet is weevils, but my gardening knowledge wouldn’t even fit on a tissue, let alone a napkin.

[TheFarmer]

Deffo slugs

[PeteSpencer]

Slugs They got our runner beans this year

Solved by a liberal coating all round of the wood ash from the bottom of the chimenea. Mixed with driveway de icing salt .......

[GrahamB]

Slugs, probably coming out at night.

I dealt with the quite localised attack in our garden by half filling a couple of large yoghourt pots with beer and sinking* them in the soil close by.

We caught seven of the buggers on the first night, and continue to snag ‘em nightly.

* good practice is to leave to top of the pots proud of the soil by an inch or so to to avoid less harmful creepy crawlies dropping in for a pint.

[skydriller]

Slugs (or snails). You cant protect against them, so you need to kill them to stop them. Either go chemical, or use whatever the latest YouTube "ecofriendly" vid says...you make the choice...

[TheKentishFledgling]

We've also had success stopping slugs with used coffee grounds scattered around the base of the plants.

[Pete L]

Our first year we had an allotment, we went all eco-friendly and used nothing.

2nd year we decided that we rather grow food for ourselves to eat.

Coffee grounds sounds like a good idea - we generate enough of those. How do hedgehogs fare on the caffeine hit?

[Propwash]

Get a hedgehog. Ours pops in every night and has a rapacious appetite for slugs and snails. You can encourage them by leaving a flowerpot saucer filled with clean water at ground level because they can't reach birdbaths for a drink and as mammals they need it. He is why we don't use slug pellets on the garden.

PW

[Boxkite]

The statement in the title clearly says the peas are being eaten by a creature called a what.

[andytk58]

The statement in the title clearly says the peas are being eaten by a creature called a what.

And by the advice above we have deduced that the slug's name is what......

[andytk58]

Slugs They got our runner beans this year

Solved by a liberal coating all round of the wood ash from the bottom of the chimenea. Mixed with driveway de icing salt .......

I've got coppertape left over, I could wrap the lower stems in it. Its stopped the snails dead in their tracks.

Andy

[Rob L]

Get a hedgehog. Ours pops in every night and has a rapacious appetite for slugs and snails. You can encourage them by leaving a flowerpot saucer filled with clean water at ground level because they can't reach birdbaths for a drink and as mammals they need it. He is why we don't use slug pellets on the garden.

PW

Thanks for that tip, PW. I have on occasion be woken in the early summer hours by the "barking" (?) of hedgehogs in my back garden, but not for a while now. I'll put a low-level drinking tray out and see if that entices them back.

On another note (off-topic) I have a family of magpies in the small woods behind my house. Now, I know they are not everyone's cup of tea, because they are raucous and eat other eggs & baby birds, but they are intelligent and entitled to live just as every other creature.

I inadvertently surprised one of them the other day, and saw it drop something white in my garden; upon inspection it was a small white proprietary paper pack of rat poison, half-open. It went into the bin.
I wonder if one of my many neighbours put it out on purpose knowing that magpies like bright objects?

[Propwash]

There may some some connection between neighbours using rat poison and the disappearance of your hedgehogs. We used to have at least 4 regular visitors to our garden every night, sometimes queuing up on hot nights to use the water bowl. Each one was surprisingly identifiable as an individual by size or colouring. Some neighbours used rat poison in their garden when some roadworks to lay new waterpipes disturbed a rats nest a couple of years ago and they started appearing in our gardens. We never saw three of our little friends again.

The two biggest problems with attracting hedgehogs in my experience are modern fences where the wooden panels sit on concrete plinths so they can't travel freely, and the use of garden poisons like slug pellets and rat poison. A fox has kindly dug a tunnel under the neighbour's fence at the bottom of our garden and our hedgehog makes good use of that to get in and out. We leave the bottom strip on our garden which is shielded from view by a nice shrub completely wild for the birds and hedgehogs. I built a des res hedgehog house in it which I am hoping will be taken into use again. I am seriously thinking of setting up a night vision camera in the garden to register exactly who uses it while I am piling up the ZZZZZs.

PW