Getting rid of garden snails

The pitfall of organic gardening is that chemicals are easy!

Our garden doesn’t have many enemies. The household cat keeps rodents and lizards away. And the combination of hummingbirds and parrots seems to keep all other bird pests from doing too much damage.

Our biggest problem has been garden snails. (Helix aspersa) Since it has been an especially mild and wet spring we have even more snails than we did last year. And they can be very destructive to our garden. They eat holes in tomatoes and eggplants, and they have destroyed many leaves of our various attempts at salad greens.

When I asked Farmer Bill over at City Farmers for the solution he laughingly said… “You need a French friend. They love snails.”

Things that have worked “just OK”

• Minimize watering since they are attracted to moisture. (Works in the summer, but this spring has been especially damp)
• Eggshells (Not sure this worked, but it was easy and probably was a decent fertilizer)

Other organic solutions (none of which we’ve tried)

• Get a duck or chicken (We are very tempted to get chickens)
• Line your garden area with copper wire (A little too expensive for me, would work if we had raised beds)
• Grow marigolds between your vegetables since all sorts of pests don’t like the smell of them. (Really like this option, going to try it)

Have I mentioned we still have a problem?

Literally, the last step before finally going on Craigslist to pick out a chicken coop is to keep trying to find organic remedies for this problem.

The Grapefruit Trap

I was doing some reading over at Pat Welch’s blog to see if I could glean a tip from a San Diego County gardening expert. She educated me on a few items I didn’t know.

1. She struggles with them, too. So I don’t suck.
2. They hibernate in the citrus trees.
3. She recommends a grapefruit trap as a potential solution.

Thanks so much for writing to share your success using upside-down grapefruit peels as a trap for slugs. I like this trap better than beer or boards. Problem with boards is you have to scrape the slugs off the bottom of them. YUCK! But with half-grapefruit peels you can just pick them up in the morning and throw them away, slugs and all.Source

So, that’s what we are trying. Our garden grows a very bitter grapefruit that is quite pretty but otherwise wasted. So I went out and cut some in half, took out most of the fruit, and placed them around the garden. I can’t wait to check them in the morning!