If slugs have munched through your prize hostas and devastated your dahlias, don’t despair. There are ways you can live with slugs and create a more slug-resilient garden.

So says lifelong gardener and ecologist, Jo Kirby, who has written The Good Slug Guide.

He offers the following tips

1. Don’t keep the garden too tidy

“Every gardener needs to know there isn’t a single slug that is fully herbivorous or vegetarian. All slugs eat other things. If you can provide those other things in the garden, suddenly the slugs have something else to feed on and they don’t have to eat your plants.

“A lot of slugs are dedicated to eating detritus. A leaf that’s being decomposed can often be as good a source of protein to a slug or snail as green leaves, and they tend to be easier to eat as well because they have fewer noxious chemicals in them.

“I would leave fallen leaves where they fall, unless you really need to move them, like on a lawn. In herbaceous borders the autumn tidy-up is a disaster as far as natural enemies are concerned, and also strips away food, so the slug has no other option than to eat your plants.”

Detritus provides shelter for slugs but it also provides nooks and crannies for their natural enemies, and research indicates there are around 75 of them.

2. Be aware of plants slugs love

Slugs love hostas, dahlias, cosmos and legumes, and Kirby confesses there are some that he can’t grow because the slugs will destroy them.

“I love Gypsophila paniculata (baby’s breath), which goes so well in a border especially if you’ve got dry stone walls. It’s a herbaceous perennial which grows to about 3ft and produces lots of small flowers – but I can’t grow it because it’s too popular with slugs and snails.

“Summer bedding is notoriously susceptible to slug damage, so it’s a case of really using slug-resistant plants such as fuchsias, plectranthus and pelargoniums, especially the ones with scented leaves.”

3. Encourage natural enemies

Kirby has researched the three common predators – hedgehogs, frogs and toads.

“Unfortunately, hedgehogs and toads in particular eat an awful lot of ground beetles, and ground beetles are probably the main predator of slugs and snails in the garden. So by encouraging toads and hedgehogs, you might well be giving yourself more of a slug problem,” he warns.

“But if you include lots of detritus in your garden, you increase the diversity in that litter layer hugely by thousands of species. Then, the desirable larger animals in the garden don’t eat so many beetles.”

Centipedes, shrews, voles and mice all eat a lot of slugs and snails, he observes. A wood mouse study found that they eat more snails than thrushes, he adds.

4. Limit digging

Try not to disturb the ground too much because you may kill beneficial creatures.

5. Keep an eye on veg

The blue-black soil slug (Arion hortensis) can be a nuisance in autumn as it will attack crops of carrots and beetroot.

“Putting a board or a small sheet of plywood on the soil surface and press it down a bit. If you look under it in the morning you’ll get an idea of what slugs you have and how many. It helps if you do use collection as a way of limiting your slug numbers.”

6. Increase ground cover

“Most natural enemies, especially beetles, hate open ground because they are very prone to dehydration and are prone to being predated if they are visible, so just fill those gaps with plants.”