"Bill Brewer" wrote in message
...
Come the rain, our snails have all woken up! :-((
I now have hundreds of the b*****s slithering around my garden gobbling
up all my prized plants.Vaseline around the rim of pots doesn't seem to
deter them, the song thrushes have long since gone and our resident
hedgehog
is nowhere to be seen so I thought I might try a few beer traps. I have
been advised that I should only use cheapo beer, why waste the good stuff
on them anyway? It seems that snails can smell beer of any quality from
many
slithers away, so if I were to use a better class of beer - I don't drink
cheapo beer and would have to buy in some poor stuff especially for them -
wouldn't it attract to my garden a better class of snail with a much more
formidable munching power than the ones here at the moment?

Bill Brewer

Encourage hedgehog with cheapo catfood if available, never put down milk as
it kills them, make sure your neighbours aren't using slug pellets.

No, vaseline won't bother them in the least. You could try rendering a
substantial band of sharp render (with sharp sand and stones about 1-2mm
across ideally) round your pot. It would need to be a few inches wide.

If you can see them all slithering I don't see what the use of the trap is -
why not just kill them where they are?

Actually I generally think, whenever I find them, that it's a waste of time
since their population will recover so quickly from any impact - they're
starving all the time in the first place. So unless I actually see them in
the wrong place at the wrong time I normally ignore them and just try to
make my slugalicious plants less appealing. (They've got enough weeds /
compost/ whatever to eat instead, let's face it.)

The new lettuces have basically survived through a week or so of rain so
that's not bad, that's all down to sharp sand.


Warwick Dumas


http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/warwickdumas