Posted: Friday 27 July 2012
by Kate Bradbury
In a normal year, I like snails. They don't trouble me as much as they seem to trouble other gardeners and I don't grow hostas.
In a normal year, I like snails. They don't trouble me as much as they seem to trouble other gardeners and I don't grow hostas. I'm happy living with the odd chewed leaf. But this year I've reached breaking point. There are too many snails and I'm taking action.
First there was the mangled dahlia. Then I accidentally left a tray of cosmos seedlings out to harden off, overnight (they were all gone by morning). But it's the lack of runner beans that's getting to me the most. It’s late July and I’ve not got a single bean plant.
It’s not through lack of trying – I weeded, I hoed. I even made a trench. And yet I’ve emptied two seed packets. Of beans.
Surely runner beans are the easiest vegetable to grow? They certainly have been in the past. Every June I pop a few seeds in the ground and don’t give them much thought until harvest time. (I water them, of course.)
But not this year. The rain and lack of sunshine in early summer kept the soil cold, so germination was slow. And then the snails came. At first, only a couple of plants were affected, having just a few chewed leaves. “They’ll pull through”, I thought. Then the snails employed a different technique – they ate the plants from the top down, leaving yellowing stumps at the base of my lovely new obelisk.
I sowed more seeds. Some I pre-soaked, to aid germination; others I raised indoors. All of them ended up in the stomachs of snails.
Birds, bees and butterflies are having a hard time after this summer's wet weather, but slugs and snails are thriving. According to one report, sales of slug pellets are booming, and there’s a national shortage of nematodes.
Slugs aren’t a problem in my garden, the frogs seem to be keeping them down. But snails have free rein. This morning I found a nursery of snail babies: my orange tree. Nearly every leaf had a little baby on it.
I’m not a slug pellets kind of a gardener. And I won’t be killing the snails, even though they have ruined this year’s dreams of eating bowls and bowls of buttery runner beans. I don't even want to rid my garden of snails, I'd just like to have fewer of them, at least for a while.
So, this weekend, my snails will be going on vacation. I’ll gather them up and take them to the park, about half a mile away (it’s thought that snails have a homing instinct, but won’t return if you take them more than 10 metres away). There’s a nice wildlife area in the park, with plenty of log and leaf piles for them to live in. But there are no dahlias, no cosmos, and no runner beans. The snails have had their banquet, it’s time for me to have mine.
ChapelGirl2
29/07/2012 at 22:40
Indeed, even here in the Savoie we have had a bumper year for snails and slugs. Unfortunately Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has proven beyond reasonable doubt that it is not possible to render even the largest slugs edible.
Egg shells, coffee grounds, wood ash. They fart in their general direction, in my experience.
I have used the so-called "bio" pellets. I'm not 100% happy, but if you take into account the cost of bags of compost, plant trays, seed, water, and the man-hours in nuturing the seedlings, then it (almost) compensates for the not completely boi-neutral nature of the product, in my view. Ok, so I sold out. It's my garden and i'll cry if I want to.
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