There is no point in growing salads at ground level in our garden – they disappear overnight as platoons of slugs and snails emerge from their hiding places in walls and terraces to feast on my efforts. Rather than spend a fortune on wool pellets and nematodes (I keep these for other crops) I grow my salads in containers that can be kept out of their reach. In the kitchen courtyard where I like them to look decorative, they are planted in metal and terracotta containers, but in the vegetable plot I use recycled fish boxes on a table top. This has worked fine until I discovered that the local fox rather liked sitting on the salads as he took in the view – so now I have had to rig up a frame covered in wire netting to protect them from yet another creature threatening their destruction. I sometimes feel that I spend far more time devising barriers than I do on actual gardening.