I am in agreement with comments above... the single most important thing you can do to reduce pests, in my opinion, is provide healthy soil. It is not often mentioned that most plants _do_ have defenses of their own; what we consider to be "flavors" are often chemical defenses against insects. Provided that the plants are healthy enough for those defenses to be effective, they can often fend for themselves. Cucumber beetles, for example, are attracted to compounds given off by plants under stress. This could be caused by disease, inadequate water, or previous attack by other insects - such as squash bugs. Given a high organic matter, pH-balanced soil with good drainage & adequate water, plants are healthier & less attractive to the beetles. While there may still be some present, their population is considerably smaller. The second thing, as mentioned by Lacyvail, is to create (or at least not discourage) a local ecosystem that encourages beneficial insects. It has often been mentioned by those who purchase those insects, that it's hard to keep them around. To do so, you need to provide a food supply for all points in their life cycle. A wide range of flowers, with long or overlapping blooming periods, is helpful. In addition to perennials _near_ your vegetable garden, plant annuals _in_ the garden. And for the larvae - which represent your true resident population - you might need to learn to tolerate enough of an aphid population to sustain them. If you are accustomed to killing off your aphids early, you might be inadvertently destroying the next generation of ladybugs & lacewings as well. For severe infestations, it might be more effective to go after the ants (which usually spread the aphids) rather than the aphids themselves. There may be some truth to companion planting; I rotate all of my vegetables each year, and have noted some good combinations (such as beans & Swiss chard). There are also some plants that don't play well with others, such as okra. If your garden is high-intensive/high-density, then it is more important to know which plants _do not_ grow well together, than it would be with conventional methods. But I think that for the most part, the issue is not which plants grow with which - it is to grow as wide a range of small plantings as possible, as opposed to large blocks. Large blocks of anything (mono cropping) promote the easy spread of insects or disease, and provide a stronger scent trail for flying insects to follow. When I began saving seeds seriously, it forced me to alter the way that I gardened. If I wanted pure seed, I had to provide space & barriers between different varieties. This meant that my beans & tomatoes, for instance, could no longer be grown together in one place, but were spaced out in different "cells" throughout the garden. In any form of experimentation, there are often unexpected results... and in this case, the fringe-benefit was an enormous reduction in insect damage. This is not to say that I have no damage - only that it has been reduced to the point of being (usually) tolerable. One last note... to encourage greater soil fertility, about 10 years ago I began to leave clover alone when weeding. I would still pull it out if it was directly in a row, but in paths & between rows was OK. After years of this, I now get a good stand of clover in the garden. When rabbits get in (as they always do) they prefer the clover in the paths to almost all of the vegetables. I guess that makes it a "trap crop" for rabbits. ;-) Only when I began to grow soybeans did I find something they like even better (and "like" is an understatement).

In Netherlands you probably have Neudorff's Ferramol available, and it's worth trying again in my opinion. It's much the same stuff as Sluggo. It works very well against all sort of snails without shell. The ones with shell tend not to spend time enough on the ground to attract them. It does help to pick them. Check dailias daily, the are slug magnets. A piece of honey or canatalupe melon is really (!!!) effective too, if you have time to check now and then and pick them. Iron sulphate and picking really helps, and pretty fast too. Withing a short week I can go from mass invation and picking about 100 a night to hardly find any. This is what I do, and it works very well here. Ferramol has been around for ages and does well in tests. There's the nematodes you water into the ground, some regard these as the most effective in the long run, but you haveI to keep it up for a couple of years. Best of luck with the slugs. It doesn't have to take a long time for you to notice major improvement :-)

Well, I'm trying the coffee grounds to see if that works. I'm encouraged that the USDA says it repels and kills slugs. I also caught a few early evening tonight and tossed them in the ol'corn can full of water. Guess what? They can't swim. I'm tired of my plants chewed to the nub. They seem to love bean plants and the crushed egg shells DO NOT WORK. If the coffee grounds don't work, I'll try the iron phosphate stuff. My main reason for going organic is HD was out of slug bait. I did put a few pieces of coral around the beans to see if that might help as well. If coffee grounds work, I'll report back. And, I drink a pot a day, so there will be plenty of grounds to use! Thanks for the advice everyone (and the offer of slug bait Imatallun!) :)

In addition to the human hair that Dorothy has mentioned, I save pet hair when I brush the dogs and cats with the Furminator (it removes tons and tons and tons of undercoat and loose hair) and scatter that dog and cat hair around places where I don't want wild critters messing with the plants. As for Rotenone, which Dorothy mentioned in passing, it has joined the growing list of organic products that we don't use any more because they can be just as toxic as chemical products. Other formerly-considered-safe organics that are not used at our home are all tobacco-based products, sabadilla dust and all pyrethrum/pyrethroid type products. We do still use neem oil, citrus oil, pepper spray and insecticidal soap at certain times of the year (not in the hottest months because they burn foliage), targeted BT products, food-grade DE, iron phospate-based snail and slug killers (though not for snails and slugs), and some biologicals like Serenade. In a perfect world, all organic products would be "safe" for use, but in the real world, even they often are not and can have unintended consequences. Some organic products are neurotoxins and can be just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the synthetic chemical products they are substituted for. One more note--when someone recommends a "home remedy" for garden pests, do your research first and make sure you know what you're doing. A lot of garden-type home remedies that are recommended are ineffective, some are dangerous and others may do what you want them to do, but then they have a secondary and unintended effect that can be dangerous. For example, insecticidal soap sprays are very effective---but they tend to kill the beneficial insects that normally help you keep the pest insects under control, so one side effect of using them is that you may end up with more, not fewer, pest insects. Also, some horticultural soaps and oils burn foliage once the temperatures are above about 85 degrees--and the degree of damage varies from plant variety to plant variety, so always test a spray (commercial or homemade) on 1 plant and wait a day or 2 to see if you see wilting/foliage death before you go out and spray every plant you have. I like sprinkling blood meal around a plant I want rabbits to avoid, but if you have dogs (or certain predator varmints), they'll be attracted to the blood meal. Every time I use blood meal, I have vultures circling for days over the garden trying to find the "dead animal" they keep smelling.