Usually, I don’t manage to get any strawberries, as the snails and slugs
generally beat me to them, however this year, a few fruits have been
picked and eaten!

How come things are different now?    I discovered that a few snail
pellets scattered around the plants helped, but what was more
successful was to place some straw around the plants.   It seems
that slugs and snails don’t like crawling over straw, so it is
very discouraging for them.

We are still working on getting bird netting totally around the
soft fruit pen, so the blackbirds are enoying the odd raid on
the strawberries, but I like birds in my garden, so won’t complain
about that.   I like to see the blackbirds nesting in the fruit trees.