Love at first sight!

One way to protect against slugs and snails is to plant marigolds in beds nearby to your precious vegetables and maybe even your sunflowers - which they just LOVE to reduce to smile-covered stalks! Marigolds, it seems, are plants with which slugs and snails have a particular affinity. It's love at first sight - or sniff!

The golden blooms and the fragranced oh-so-tasty foliage seem to call to the very soul of any creature that slides along the ground on a cushion of slime. They travel for miles, overcoming natural barriers and a veritable maze of cunningly placed slug pellets in order to reach their amour and to taste her sweet green flesh.

The result of this almost certainly one-sided love affair, of course, is a ravaged marigold bed but maybe, just maybe, this is why the runner beans remain as yet unassailed! I wonder whether planting marigolds alongside lettuce would have a similar result. My guess is that in a worse case scenario they would be so torn between the two that they would pause, dazzled by the choice in front of them, long enough that passing hungry birds or frogs would gobble them up! For now, my marigolds continue to "take one for the team".