Then countless further hours carefully raising and nurturing tiny plants from seed through a fragile adolescence indoors on a windowsill before finally planting them out into their new home in the garden.Then the first damp evening: death by slug-horde.
Now. I have nothing personal against slugs and snails: in fact I rather like snails, but when they treat the fruits of our labour so casually it is hard to feel so kindly towards them. So what's a novice vegetable-grower, keen to avoid slug pellets and other chemicals to do?
Well I guess the answer to that question depends upon how handy you are with a soldering iron - and your views on the application of animal rights to slugs and snails.
Personally I would recommend making an electric slug fence, and soothing your conscience (and laziness) by keeping it charged from a solar cell.
Here's one I made earlier:
(In situ powered by a 1.6Ah lead-acid battery)
Connected to the fence itself (available from ebay)
And showing a bit more of the fence in place
(And connected to the solar cell)
It took three goes to get a practical version up and running: the first didn't work at all. The second worked extremely well: turning large snails around in their tracks and (perhaps slightly unfortunately) killing small slugs outright.
However it only offered a couple of nights protection but then drained the battery flat. After several modifications (replacing a power-hungry NE556 timer with a lower power CMOS equivalent, and changing the mark-space ratio of both the driving oscillator and the timing oscillator: longer spaces, shorter marks) this final version should consume about one tenth of the power and be able to run continuously throughout the summer.
Ingredients:
* One lower-power dual timer chip (7556)
* One maplin miniature audio transformer (32 ohm : 12 k ohm)
* One BD235 NPN power transistor
* Four 1N4003 diodes
* Various resistors and capacitors
