The next problem with gardening

is that I go to the garden centre to pick up one of these
and come home with one of these
which is very pretty and smells heavenly, but wasn't really the plan. I fell in love with this so much that I carried it and the strimmer off to the checkout, forgetting to have a hunt around to find something to stop this
from happening to any more of my plants. I do not like snails. Or slugs. I also do not like slugpellets.

Here's a diversion. My last house was slug infested. Not the garden, the house. Slugs used to throw parties in the night, and I'd come downstairs in the morning to discover silvery slimy slug-webs all over the floor. Very pretty, but not terribly practical. And coming downstairs in the middle of the night was always a hazardous occupation - getting a squished slug stuck between the toes is not my idea of late night fun. Even now I see a small black thread on the floor, my feet start climbing the walls in memory. I think the finest shudder moment was when I turned the taps on in the kitchen one morning and was greeted with a two inch long slug sliming its way out of the overflow gap.

It's not that I didn't try to get rid of them. Slug pellets weren't an option as I had a pet cat and small children. Salt trails across every doorway and window made an interesting contrast to the slugwebs but had no noticeable effect on their ability to enter the house. It didn't help that it was a Victorian house with a suspended floor and loose floorboards - I'm sure they crawled in through the gaps in the floor. Gardeners' Question Time at the time suggested a stick with a nail through it, spike the slugs onto the stick and drop them into a brine solution. I couldn't do it then and I couldn't do it now. I mention it as an option for others in a similar position.

We tried the salt. I tried gravel, I tried copper anti-slug tape. The beasties kept coming, my toes kept squelching. Did you know too that slug slime in large quantities is bogey-like in consistency, when trying to clean it up after it has dried out? Beer was another suggestion. Slugs like beer apparently; fill a dish full of beer and they'll crawl in, get drunk, and drown. I didn't fancy throwing them into brine but somehow facilitating slug suicide by providing a pan of beer didn't seem to fall into quite the same league. It was a decent beer too; they'd have died happy. However it didn't quite work like that. They liked the beer - the trail of slime showed that - weaving lacey patterns around the pan, in and over and under the pan, more slime than ever before. But far from drowning in the beer, they appeared to have thrown a party, invited their friends, convinced a few snails to join them, before retiring under the floor once more to sleep it off.

I gave it up after that and bought a pair of slippers.
Tia