Non-edibles doing better than the edibles

The garden is looking neat. I spent all of Saturday toiling away. I removed at least 95% of the weeds. But there are not two ways about it, the vegetables aren't doing nearly as well as the flowers and ferns. The foxgloves are gorgeous. The white roses at the back of the garden are in full bloom, and have coped surprisingly well with their shady position.

My ferns are growing well.

Amazingly really, considering that the far end of the garden never gets any direct sunlight and generally somewhere between damp and positively soggy. That's me finally learning the lesson that you need to match the conditions to the plant. I specifically picked ferns that do well in full shade (most ferns) and damp (fewer ferns than I originally thought).
The raspberries (in the bed down side of the shed) are doing brilliantly too. They're growing like weeds - strongly and everywhere. What they have in common with my non-edibles is that I didn't plant them this year. The vegetables, which went in this year, aren't doing well at all. I've already bemoaned the fact at length that I started late and badly (see previous posts for the full moan). Well, if that weren't enough, now I've got slugs and snails decimating my seedlings, or in other words my entire vegetable crop. Actually, I wish they were only decimating them in the original sense of the word. "Decimate" originally meant to kill one in every ten of a group. My slugs and snails are much more voracious than that. I  suppose technically if you included my weeds in the group of plants that slugs and snails are eating, then it might be just one in ten. It's just that my garden gastropods are passing over my weeds and going straight for the things I want to eat too, and devouring them to the point of no return. We're talking every single trace of leaf gone on a lot of the seedlings.
This is what my cucurbits (squash, courgettes etc.) ought to look like right now given how late I planted them:

But the ones where I wasn't quick enough with the copper rings and the slug pellets have been eaten right away:

I don't like using slug pellets. I worry what they're doing to the local food chain and environment. But I lost nearly a quarter of my plants in one night and decided I had to do something.
As a compromise, I've been going out on slug patrol every morning to collect the dead slugs and snails, to try and stop them from entering the food chain. My bin is now full of them, I've collected dozens.
I'd like to use the garlic solution instead, but I haven't had time to trial it yet. I heard about it on TV and it sounds promising. What you do it boil up several garlic cloves in a small pan of water. After that I've heard two different options recommended: either leave the garlic in the water in a bowl and put it out in the middle of the garden or put the garlic water into a spray bottle and spray your plants with it.
This year has been problem after problem after problem, none of which is the fault of the weather, which has been great. Here's a picture of last year for comparison:

4 June 2017

My cucurbits were flowering already!
In fact, most things looked bigger.

4 June 2017

Still, I am persevering. All is not lost yet, despite the best efforts of the local slug population.