As the country's interest in growing fruit and vegetables in our back gardens rises (or on allotment if you have managed to survive the twenty year waiting lists!), so too is the population of of slime trailing green leaf assasins - slugs and snails. I once saw a episode of River Cottage where the small holders' idol, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (or "he who kills and eats it all" as I refer to him) made slug fritters, he seriously did. Even more disturbing is the fact that it wasn't just an academic exercise in the potential for slugs as a food source, he went on to eat them. All this was shown before the nine o'clock watershed too.

Personally, my favourite way of dealing with slugs and snails is to inflict a gruesome, messy death upon them as a twisted form of revenge for the damage they inflict upon the contents of my garden. I take some pleasure in my knowledge that for every dead slug in my yard, there is a lettuce who, if our salad leaf friends could talk, would surely thank me for giving them the gift of life and willingly offer their sacrafice as an addition to my ham sandwiches in their gratitude. When it comes to my battle with slugs and snails, I feel like some green fingered God dispensing justice from his fingertips, or in my case, from the rattle and shake of a plastic container of Wilko's Snail and Slug Pellets.

I haven't always been a gardening killer, happily scattering toxic bullets of laser blue coloured metaldehyde death onto my soil. To explain the background of the use of slug pellets further, and to qoute Ernie Wise, "here is a story what I wrote":

"Once upon a time, there was a dooyoo reviewer with a garden. His garden gave him and his family food through the miracle of organic magic. He respected nature for this, and, in return for nature's bounty, he vowed to google "organic gardening" and live his life in accordance with the great oracle's instructions, making sure to show respect for the life of his plants and the important insects that visited them.

As his vegetables grew, so did his family, and so did the amount of food his family required from the garden. All was going well - salads were eaten, pickles and jams were bottled and potatoes were duly washed, peeled and mashed.

One year however, there was a great famine in the man's garden - the green shoots of the potato plants appeared then vanished, the lettuce leaves were turned into clumps of bare stalks and the pea plants were destroyed. "Slugs!!!!" shouted the man, and, in his organic way, he tried companion planting, strategically placed beer traps (beer was bought in especially as the man didn't drink very often) and he even tried filling a submerged baby bath with water to attract slug eating toads and frogs.

None of this put off the slugs, so at great expense he bought some copper tape and also sprinkled crushed egg shells and coffee grounds around his plants to put off his adversary, the slug. Nothing changed, the slugs still came in their Gengis Khan inspired hordes into the damp summers of a Lancashire summer and raped and pillaged his garden.

His organic / chenical free / wildlife friendly efforts never seemed to stop the slugs or snails, so one day, in great despair, he turned to google for help. This time however, the man came across a dooyoo review for Wilko snail and slug pellets. The review gave the pellets 4 out of 5 stars, stating that full marks couldn't be given as the pellets could harm hedgehogs and toads, but also stated that these pellets were the ultimate nemesis for slugs.

The man bought some, used them, killed all the slugs and consequently him, his family and his garden all lived happily ever after. The End."

On a serious note, although I abandoned my green conscience massively by turning to chemical aids, I feel I can justify this and still sleep at night by making sure I perform a daily harvest of dead slugs and snails before any birds, toads etc can eat them and ingest the poison.

These pellets are extremely effective, and if used sensibly by removing dead slugs before other wildlife get to them, then I see no reason why I shouldn't award the pellets a full five out of five stars. Thanks for reading.