Welcome to Shoot the Breeze, our weekly chat session on the gardening blog.
This week I've taken inspiration from Greg Becker's wonderful cartoon, entitled Spirals of Despait, for our subject matter. We're on about pests: cats. Rats. Snails. Slugs. Beetles. Birds. There is no end of things to vex you in the veg plot. Some gardeners are terribly squeamish - or put more positively, kindly - towards marauding pests: a couple of years back we ran a funny piece from Allan Shepherd on his gentle battle to redirect his local slug population to a sacrificial pile of comfrey.
I am often a bit reluctant to admit this, for fear of a lynching from jealous gardeners, but snails and slugs aren't a big problem in my patch. My big enemy is the wood pigeon, which likes to decimate my brassicas. I know the answer is netting, and lots of it, but I hate having to shift loads of fiddly pegs every time I want to weed or harvest things.
My neighbour - a fellow gardening enthusiast and wood pigeon hater - have idly speculated about the possibility of getting an air rifle and solve the problem that way while providing a nice sideline in fresh meat, which could also come in handy in the event of an apocalyptic, post-oil scenario. If foxes are your problem, I just read a tip in a new book called Chick Days: Raising Chickens From Hatchlings to Laying Hens that the best way of putting them off is to leave a radio tuned to a talk station in the vicinity of your birds. It's one use for TalkSport, anyway.
What's your horticultural nemesis? Do you have a top tip for defeating snails, slugs or any other pest? Have your say in the comments below.
