Overcoming the gastrop-odds

I'm a bit miffed if I'm honest.

I've visited the plot a few times recently, and whatever encouraging growth there was the previous time I visited has been stripped bare by slugs, snails and whatever else - despite best attempts to halt their progress with garlic water, slug traps and so on, the tender veg shoots are just getting devoured...

(From  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug) 

...and the rain just keeps coming and coming - my well tilled earth is becoming like a quagmire, and I'm feeling desperately concerned for anything in the ground that the seed packets advise shouldn't be overwatered.

Still, I'm not the sort of person to give up lightly, and to be honest if you are a gardener in the U.K. it is probably par for the course (can I hear an 'Amen'?). If you can't weather the downs you have no right to enjoy the ups... and I guess it makes it all the more rewarding in the end.

In fact, I'm feeling positively Churchillian about it - 'We'll fight them on the raised beds, we'll fight them in the greenhouses'... basically, they aren't going to win... even if I have to set up an entire moat of real ale around my plot and patrol by night with a headlamp and speargun!

So, I've got back to my mini greenhouse and sowed some more drills and pots with the veg seeds I have already sown a few weeks ago in the ground. I figure that if I can get some decent seedlings going and get them past the tender stage, they will stand a much better chance of dodging becoming breakfast or supper for the passing gastropods...

As well as the fennel, radish and beetroot, I have sown some spring onions (White Lisbon) and cabbage (Hispi F1). I will also be doing some kale, and perhaps also some broccoli or cauliflower thanks to some encouragement from Sue@G.L. Allotments the other day.