We have been using Slug Rings for several years on our Wiltshire small holding. Since we don't actually poison, trap or kill our slugs, there are always plenty left for the ducks to gobble up.

A large Slug Ring protecting the tender new spring shoots on my favourite delphinium.

Little pale slugs are attracted to lettuces, so they need to be kept safe in large rings.

Effective and easy to use.

Slip a Slug Ring around a plant stem, scrunch it lightly into the soil, and your plant will be safe from slug and snail damage.

Here in Monkton Farleigh we invented copper Slug Rings to save our plants from being eaten without harming our ducks, who would happily eat slugs and snails contaminated with slug pellets. Slug Rings have proved to be so effective that since we started in 2002 we have made 15 tons of copper rings, sold all over the country by mail order.

Slugs and snails taste everything that they crawl on, and they can't abide the taste of copper, so we make Slug Rings from solid copper to fence off plants from slug and snail attack.

This is an environmentally friendly way to keep slugs and snails off your plants. Since the rings cause no harm, you can have healthy plants and healthy slugs and snails too, encouraging natural garden predators like hedgehogs, slow-worms, frogs and thrushes. No more poisonous pellets, no more free beer for gastropods and no more slug hunting by torchlight!

Slug Rings are guaranteed to last a lifetime. They can be used over and over again for season after season.

In April 2004 Gardening Which? conducted trials of barrier methods to protect plants from slugs and snails, using hostas as bait. In their May 2005 edition they published the results and it came as no surprise to us that Slug Rings were proven to be the most effective barrier protection of all those tested for plants in the ground and were recommended as a 'best buy'.

This month we have moved the small slug rings from the broad beans and the sweet peas onto the brassica, pea and spinach seedlings. The delphiniums, lupins and salvias are growing strongly in the large rings which we kept in place all winter. I have opened out and joined large and small rings together to make big enough rings to surround the hostas whose crowns have widened considerably since last year. In the greenhouse we use slug rings as short columns on the staging to support planks which we put seed trays on. Then our trays of seedlings are not in danger from the snails which creep around the greenhouse every night.