Dwarf beans eaten over night. Help?

Hi all

I'm a new gardener and so could do with some advice please.

I had dwarf french beans in the ground. They were netted and checked all the time for aphids and so on. Woke up to bare 1 inch stems. No idea what's had them. No trails from slugs. Cannot see any caterpillars. There were no aphids from what I've been seeing. I'm at a loss.

I've become a little obsessed with checking all of my plants every morning and every evening for aphids and slugs, snails and so on. I've planted a few companion plants around the garden to try to help with the pests. I also have a pollinator area with quite a few different plants to attract good critters in the hopes they'd be my saving grace however those plants are all still small and many haven't flowered yet so not getting the full benefits yet.

Has anybody encountered this before and how did you deal with it? What could be the culprit. Difficult to tell as there aren't even any leaves to see how they've been munched.
How do you deal with pests in general?
I don't want to use chemical as we want to eat our harvest but also I don't want to upset nature.

Thanks

 

My bet would be slugs and snails especially if you have just had a drop of rain and the soil surface is wet.
They don't tend to leave trails when it's very damp.

 

Definitely Slugs. Snails are normally better behaved. They nibble but don't eat everything in their path.

Rain attracts them, whereas dry and rough soil keeps them at bay.

 

My first attempt at a slug trap, I had a look at it today having put it down a few days ago. A 500 gram flat, shallow shaped (Fage) yogurt pot filled about two thirds full with half water and half stale Peroni. I found two slugs in it, drowned and completely dead.

I also today found a Salvia splendens "Blaze of Fire" seedling I have been nurturing for a couple of months, had about eight leaves on it, and something has been eating it, probably slugs. I did also add a few ferrous phosphate slug pellets today. It rained yesterday, so that is probably when the Salvia seedling got eaten by slugs.

I had read about beer traps for slugs but never tried one before, as I don't usually have beer around. Slugs do seem perfectly capable of climbing into a 500 gram Fage yogurt pot two thirds filled with beer and water, and drowning.

 

True, but they also attract every slug in the neighborhood if the wind is right. So for every slug you catch, you can be sure there are three others already on their way. And long journeys make them hungry, so they stop from time to time and eat what's available. That's why I don't use them. There's already enough of them without hanging a sign "free beer" on the outside of my garden

 

Remember to tread lightly upon the leopard slug, Limax maximus, for they are (generally) on our side. See the glowing testamonial from Peter Thompson of the Game &Wildlife Conservation Trust-
February - Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust