I live in the warm moist, maritime, Mediterranean SF Bay Area, where we
have escaped Escargot rampant in our gardens. I'm a 100% organic (don't
poison your mother) gardener, so the bait are unacceptable to me. My
solutions:
* Lots of hand picking
* Copper barriers around precious plants, or extemely young plants
I paid $20 for a bunch of scrap copper strips years ago, and
they still work. Snails just won't cross it. If you put it
around plants already in the ground, do check for a few days
to be sure you haven't trapped any snails INSIDE the barrier.
And it doesn't work if plants you want to protect are touching
other unprotected plants, snails will find the detour to get
to something they especially want.
* Knowing the hiding spots. The banana-leaves trick sounds similar.
I've found certain plants (like Dietes, for example) where they
hide way down in the nest of leaves during the day. Making daytime
picking easy. Curiously, snails also seem to love junk mail,
especially the heavy coated papers. Leave some out in the
evening, and come out with a flashlight.
> Of course, if you really want it to be like military action, go on
> night-time search and destroy missions. I use a small flashlight that I hold
> in my mouth to keep my hands free
Camping places, like REI, sell "head lights", headbands with
flashlights on the forehead. The light shines wherever you look.
Very handy, or un-handy, as the case may be.
> ducks and geese
As long as you don't have tender young seedlings, they're supposed
to be great. I used to cart containers of snails over to some friends
who had chickens, but they said the eggs got too hard to crack!
All that extra calcium in the snail shells.
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