Snail Hunt

 

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21 May 2017 at 23:02 ·

Went on a snail hunt tonight, only got 4; Fester and I think it might be something to do with the very dry April.

While I was out a beautiful grey and white cat came and had a chat with me; very friendly, thin but her coat was really silky and in good condition.

Drummerman  'Cos she'd eaten all the snails: non-fattening and great for the hair...

Drummerman  Ps, if you want snails we've got plenty, of several varieties.

Kentishlady  You are always welcome to collect snails at the allotment!

Ms PH  Slightly off the point, how are you doing for tadpoles/froglets?  Did moving the spawn work ok?

Mr Strawangel  Why are you searching for snails lv? X  I noticed a distinct lack here too over the last two years, until I discovered a hedgehog family were living in my garden.   

I thought they might be eating them.  We are blessed free of snails and slugs now for 2 years. 😊

The Wormarium

Bentonbag  A few years ago I made the mistake of putting snails in my wormarium thinking 

"They eat dead vegetable matter too so their poo will be as useful as the worms'".  

The large snails couldn't get out: they stayed put and multiplied, and the little snails could and did get out, and razed the runner beans etc. to the ground, and multiplied some more. 

So most summer nights, especially damp ones, I go out with a head-torch and trug.  

My record is 25 snails in 5 minutes.   

They go in the brown compost bin and the local council takes them away.   

I did see a hedgehog late last year and I'm hoping s/he is taking care of the slugs - there's plenty of them.

I don't know where the frogspawn went, but suddenly there were, and are, milloons of tadpoles. I think it sank into the detritus at the bottom of the pond.  At the moment some are huge, others are still tiny, as well as the normal black ones there are two or three that are pale brown.  They are eating all the algae in the pond as well as anything that falls in and dies.  This includes a couple of garden snails that have tumbled in when going for a drink (symptomatic of how dry it's been) and a nestling killed but not eaten by one of the cats.  We also have scores of water snails descended from the ones that survived when Fester did a sampling of water bodies at Milne Row a few years ago.

Ms PH Sounds very promising.  Your frogspawn dilemma occurred to me when walking Scamp around Wooler Common where there hundreds of very large black tadpoles also Mr & Mrs Melodeon posted that photo of their magnificent toad.  Wish I had amphibians in my garden!   Long-term plan is to do a pond.  I'll know where to come for some good Lancashire water snails. X

Bentonbag Mine is The Squireen’s old clamshell sandpit/paddling pool.  The shells are nested in each other to give a double skin, it's pushed into a corner of the garden with planters, old bricks and bits of broken crockery under and around it to both hold it in place, protect from frost and give places for mini-creatures to hide and live.  There's also a staircase of old bricks to the edge of the pond so any mice/hedgehogs that fall in have a chance to swim and clamber out.

If we'd dug a pond Fester would have only walked into it - this way there's no chance and no trip hazard.