Strawberry patch upgrade

I love strawberries. 

When I was a little girl I would visit my grandma on the farm and she would always have strawberries and cream for me.  When the boys were two, we visited a strawberry farm in Tasmania. I have great memories from that day.... Oh the smell! And some of my favourite photos of our family were taken there.

Not long after, the boys were given strawberry plants for the garden.Each year we have harvested a punnet or two worth of strawberries, while the snails and slater bugs eat kilos of them! I've tried a few things to stop this, but it is hard to find advice when most gardening forums declare that slater bugs don't eat strawberries.  Well I say they do... I've seen them eat them!

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/post-2155216.html

Last summer, I took the boys to the Timboon strawberry farm.  We picked a huge bucket to take home to eat and make strawberry jam, and I asked the farmer his advice.  He put me onto a particular snail bait (I don't like using it though, and plan to find an organic alternative this year) and said I should use black plastic as a 'mulch' instead of straw (the slater bugs live in decaying organic matter).
I had every intention of following this advice until I went to actually buy the plastic and faced two problems. 1. I am terribly frugal and hate spending on anything and 2. I'm trying to rid our lives of plastic, not buy more!

So I did more research.  There is a weed mat available that is phytodegradable.  That would do the job, except it is pricey (see point 1 above).  So I looked for alternatives and found someone selling cardboard mulch.  It was cheaper, but still pricey, and what was it? Plain old Cardboard!

And so, I went to my pile of boxes that were still hanging around from all the flat pack kitchen cupboards we bought from Ikea, and I used it to redo my strawberry patch.

Will it solve my problems? No idea, but it was free! I'll let you know next summer.