Saturday, May 27, 2006

War on snails

Snails are Namur's mascot - we're supposed to be slow people, or at least to speak slowly (with a heavy Namur accent!).
That hasn't stopped me from waging war on snails in our garden. We have a lovely laburnum tree, which snails love to bits - literally. One year, we nearly got no flowers and we thought that the tree would not survive the assault. Since then, I keep a close eye on it when it starts to grow fresh leaves in the spring.
I got this eco-friendly system, which is just a little green container with a lid, in which you put water with plenty of salt. Snails seem to die instantly when thrown in salted water (I'd rather not look). So I go around the garden and pick up the big snails (I don't have the heart to take the small ones) and throw them in this container.
This spring, it got so bad that I had to resort to slug pellets. I sprinkled a ring of slug pellets all around the laburnum. The following morning, I counted 50 dead snails around my tree.

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