My garden is suffering from an excess of large brown snails at the moment. If there are any chefs out there who want to add them to the menu, I will deliver! Not that I enjoy killing snails. I normally throw them over the fence into the neighbour's garden (it's an empty plot, so that's not quite as mean as it sounds), but I recently heard that a study was done to determine whether snails came back home like pigeons do. The researcher painted the snail shells with nail varnish and took them away to be released in a field a few blocks from home and, lo and behold! a good number returned. So that appears to be a pointless exercise. I throw them onto the lawn and hope that nature will take its course and bring in the snail-eating birds, but I've never seen that happen yet. Perhaps they are too big?
I wouldn't mind them eating a few leaves, but they are decimating my clivia buds and they are the most stunning flowers, providing big splashes of colour ranging from orange to peach at this time of year. It looks rather pathetic when only 3 buds open on the whole head of about 10! They have also eaten the petals off many of the daisies and vygies which are now blooming, which rather defeats the purpose of nurturing them through winter. There is nothing quite so disappointing as a daisy with petals only 1mm long!
I'm considering picking the snails and putting them in green bags to take far away to the compost dump, but then I picture them going through the 'bossieslaner' (shredder) and that is not a pretty picture. I think I'll stick to my original plan and keep throwing them over the fence. Maybe they'll get tired of the return trip and stay there.
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