“Last year, the vegetables were a disaster. The slugs had the time of their lives,” says Jo Whiley, recalling every gardener’s worst nightmare. “Everything I planted got eaten. Snails went on the rampage, too. I’d come home from work and go out into the veg patch and see this black, oozy sea of mess.

“It was a particularly wet year, but I thought, ‘I’m not giving in, I’ll plant more runner beans, more peas, more lettuces, more strawberries, more of everything’. But I’d come back and find they’d decimated the place all over again. I never get stressed in the garden, but this really stressed me out.”

The slimy little creatures clearly got under Whiley’s skin. “I had to find a solution,” she continues. “I read books, did endless internet searches, quizzed gardeners. I even asked Monty Don! In the end, this is what I have learnt about slugs: you cannot beat them. There is nothing you can do. Nothing. They will always win, so you might as well just give in.

“After last year, I knew I had to make a change. There are a few veg that I will optimistically carry on growing, like potatoes and beetroot, plus a few herbs – hopefully the ones the slugs hate, like rosemary, thyme and mint. But my bigger plan of action is to turn over a lot of the veg patches to growing more cutting flowers instead. In the last few years, I started cutting a few roses to bring into the kitchen, but now I’m hoping to grow enough flowers to fill the whole house.”