Escar Uh-oh!
As the famous Crow once told us, “All I wanna do is have some fun. I get the feeling I’m not the only one,” and it was with this in mind my crew and I barrowed to the garden between the thunderstorms.
The other goal besides fun was to transplant the first tomato and melon seedlings of the year and put in a few bush bean seeds. “Yippee!” clamored my spirit, and we even put in healthy red cabbage seedlings. This was a very good day.
What I noticed, however, under leaves and mulch in several beds were a few small snails. During my gardening time in northwest Arkansas, I had noticed very few snails at first, and they were always tiny. Over the years I saw them more often, but they never seemed to bother anything.
My crew and I went to a bed in front of the house to transplant a mystery plant because it came up unannounced in a greenhouse pot and it looked important, so it was time to find its new home, and near that home were also a couple tiny snails. I pulled mulch back a bit to find a riffraff of at least two dozen small snails playing cards and probably drinking, waiting for the cover of dark to eat my petunias.
This was new for my Arkansas gardening experience. I learned about snails during my gardening days in northern California where European brown snails are more common than Volvos which are everywhere. Snails reportedly were introduced to California in mid-19th century because new European arrivals missed eating escargot. Have you ever been forlorn because it’s been three whole months since you ate escargot?
California was paradise for these snails, and they spread up and down the coast. They also hitchhiked to the Central Valley where they have caused considerable damage to citrus and other fruit crops by ravaging the leaves and fruit and even eating the bark of saplings. There are photos showing hundreds of snails climbing tree trunks to get to the leaves. The damage makes fruit and nuts more expensive for the rest of us.
In my Sonoma County gardening experience, vegetable gardens and flower beds were, literally, all-you-can-eat salad bars for European brown snails. You know how some people are hard to trust? The snails I encountered were honest and upfront about eating anything I planted. I respect that about them.
But they were such a problem that every local had family folk remedies for protecting plants from snails. Aggressive hunter types would stage boards or cardboard propitiously so that snails would hide under there until… until the hunter swoops in and uncovers them and drops them into a bucket of water. I don’t know what happened after that.
Another remedy was placing near a hot bed of snail activity a shallow bowl of beer into which snails would plunge and drown.
“I’m not giving any of my beer to snails.”
“Buy some cheap brand.”
Pause. “But still…”
Pause. “I see your point.”
One garden I had was in a neighborhood, and in one of the pathways was the grate of a square storm drain. The grid of the grate was just wide enough that a gardener, if necessary, could drop a dozen or so European brown snails into the drain and wish them well on their journey toward the river.
I even tried lining up a bunch of pennies around plants to test the copper-aversion legend, but it did not work.
I also encountered a gentleman with a different perspective on the whole situation. He ran a snail ranch. His free-range herds roamed the insides of cages littered with leftover bread and cabbage leaves. Once the critters had purged themselves sufficiently, he froze them for resale to restaurants.
Snail-ranching will not be my career choice, and I hope the new gastropod sharecroppers and I can come to a proper understanding.