Are you a one-in-five snail hurler?
A recent report from the RHS says that one in five gardeners throw snails over their neighbour’s fence. The prominence the survey got in the national media was astonishing, everyone wanted to know about snail chucking. It grabbed far more attention than more familiar snippets such as; ‘One in three gardeners don’t possess a dibber’ or ‘eight gardeners out of ten have never used a lawn spike.’
Snail hurling might seem like a particularly nasty thing to do, but in many ways it’s the coward’s solution. Instead of poisoning them, or stamping on them, you’re passing on the problem to someone else. And surveys like that just make me want to ask more questions: Did that figure include slugs? They’re a bit icky to pick up aren’t they. Were these people all RHS members (in which case, was the question ‘do you admit to aerial relocation of gastropodus irritatingii?) Were they serial snail chuckers, spree snail chuckers or opportunity snail chuckers? How far, on average, would they lob the snail?
And finally, when they lobbed the hapless snail over the fence, like a small invertebrate mortar shell sailing through the air, did they wait to hear the tiny crunch of it landing?
Television programmes can be very right-on about slugmageddon. It’s almost a taboo subject. They secretly know that the only real way to get rid of slugs is with slug pellets but they can’t come out and say it. ‘Surround your plants with a copper sheath.’ Right. As we all know, they’re never 100% effective are they - and given the price of copper these days, you’ll need a mortgage extension to fund your friendly slug deterrant. Plus you’ll start getting gangs of Eastern-European copper thieves roaming about suburban gardens.
By rights, as a trained environmentalist I should be trying to work out some ecological balance between slug predators and their prey. But it’s hard to take a balanced approach when you plant 50 snowdrop bulbs and only one struggles limply to the surface in January. Ducks and chickens in the back garden aren’t a solution, unless you want to look like you’ve turned into Pa Larkin. So what about frogs and hedgehogs?
Hedgehogs would be lovely, but they’re not exactly swelling in numbers despite the presence of an all-you-can-eat buffet – i.e. my garden. And in my experience frogs just tend to sit under stones for most of the summer and look resentful when you uncover them. They don’t look like the active type who are going to hop out and chomp their way through brigades of marauding slugs, no, a couple of nice big ones and that’s them sorted. They can retire to their stone and wait for hibernation. And hope that the rock-lifting guy doesn’t pass their way.
There is always the option of using some vicious parasitic nematodes which will go to work on the slug population and kill them underground. But it’s very difficult to know if they’ve worked or not. It’s comforting to see the slug body count. Killing them on the surface may have its hazards for other wildlife but it gives you an indication of the size of the problem.
As subscribers to an excellent green-bin scheme, we actually have a midway solution between the ‘KILL THEM, KILL THEM ALL!’ camp and what I would call the ‘Mr Barraclough’ (from Porridge) attitude to our trail-leaving friends. If we find a slug or a snail in the garden it goes in the green bin. This isn’t extermination, it’s more of a Shakespearian solution. It’s banishment.
In Shakespeare’s plays; dukes, lords and earls get banished all the time. Admittedly not to a council-run composting centre, but they live to fight another day. In the remaining days before the bin is collected slugs and snails are free to escape at any time. Once out of the bin, they can stretch their…erm…foot…and go. With our blessing. If they want to recreate Walt Disney’s Incredible Journey and return to the lettuce patch where they came from, they can try and get back there.
Now you might say this is just like throwing it over your neighbours’ fence without the exercise, but it inconveniences no-one, gives you the moral high ground and may well add to the richness of future compost. And it avoids you being labelled with one of those nasty two-word monikers such as – wife-beater, child-stealer or shed dweller. Nobody wants to be singled out as a slug-hurler, snail-chucker, especially at a barbecue with your neighbours. FH
