Growing Organic: Our Harvest of Slugs & Snails

The other day, someone asked me if we were really, truly, deeply committed organic subsistence farmers, or the type who made grand claims but maybe surreptitiously laid down the odd bit of snail bait on occasion, or dusted some plants with a non-organic pest deterrent, justifying it to ourselves that it's not so bad, really, and that surely some others must do it anyway, and besides which, whose to know anything except ourselves. However, I could assure our interlocutor, "We are so organic we often don't have a harvest." "Ah - " came the reply - "then you are indeed organic".

Our largest cabbage yet, but nonetheless still with snail-bitten leaves

Truth to be told, however, our commitment to organic wavers, not only on the odd, but increasingly on the even occasion, particularly when dealing with the voracious, omnivorous feeders that constitute our population of backyard slugs and snails.

My dear great-aunt Muriel was frail and somewhat crippled by a childhood illness, but had a legion of gardeners helping her in her magnificent landscaping efforts. Her garden was a thing of joy, utterly entrancing, with byways leading you into little gems of hidden gardens, up stairs and down stairs and around corners, a series of garden rooms, some charming and some simply magnificent: her azaleas in bloom beggared you of adjectives. 

However, as the wife of a farmer in a necessarily rural locale, the creation of a vegetable garden was a necessity, and she produced crops both munificent and magnificent. Generally speaking, Aunty Muriel was shy and displayed the typical taciturnity provided by the Scots blood that ran strong in her family, and which was compounded by leading an isolated life. She was mostly to be found simply digging around in her garden. 

As a child, I only knew her as a gentle and generous soul, that is, until the day I espied her face contort into an expression of pure, undiluted hatred as she pounced upon, and popped a snail vigorously between her fingers: Snap, Crunch! not content even to wait to crush it underfoot. I filed it in my memory box, at the time, under the heading: Very Peculiar Things Grown-Ups Do. 

Fast-forward to today, I am afraid to say I would not like my expressions filmed when I go out into the garden at night, especially after a nice sprinkle of rain, taking my children with me to shiver in the cold and play our torches over the black ground, daring both slugs and snails to come out and take their chances. Of course, my husband, always practical, on the third such night (between the two of us, we had already made short work of over 150 snails), came out to the garden carrying old yoghurt cartons we recycle, mostly as plant containers, and gave each child one, with the instruction that a race was on.

My children compete with great avidity, and evince remarkable political skills, particularly with regard to negotiating abilities, not to mention squabbling over the outcomes. So, first of all, it was submitted to parental judgement that our youngest child, and only daughter, had received both the brightest torch and parental help. Point taken, so the boys were allowed to compete as a team. However, when the results of their labours were scrutinised in the kitchen, and Bethany's proved at first glance to be more voluminous, they forwarded the proposition that since we had not agreed on terms before-hand, they cogently argued that a numeric method should be used, knowing, of course, that they had caught many, smaller snails. However, they also told us that merely glancing at how high the contents were was an inadequate scientific measure, and that, in the interests of science, we should at least undertake to weigh the goods. So they both won, Bethany on weight and Conall and Faran on sheer numbers, but since my eldest son does not consider a win-win an acceptable outcome, being eager always to be first, we had to contend with vociferous clamouring in that regard. 

But at least our harvest of 150 snails was worth it, even though Bethany insisted initially on keeping them as pets, until they began escaping the pots by sheer weight of numbers, and we are still finding snails in peculiar places throughout the kitchen. 

Thus far, our toll stands at well over 600, though we are at least now seeking out the smallest slugs and hatchling snails. Apart from feeling like a right royal idiot that I had not worked out what was wreaking annihilation upon all our vegetables, I only now understand how deeply sexist is the following rhyme:

What are little boys made of? 

What are little boys made of?

Slugs and snails 

And puppy dogs' tails, 

That's what little boys are made of. 

Apart, of course, from the fact that little girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, any vegetable grower soon learns, quite simply, to hold an unending grudge against snails, and you are locked in unceasing combat against them, lest you lose entire harvests. In particular, they love the soft leaves of new growth, and tend so to compromise young seedlings such as cabbage and spinach, they they are quite unable to recover. But even the hairy-leafed borage they will happily vreet (an impolite Afrikaans form of eat).

But I am afraid to say we were most remiss in that regard, having been stupefied by this concept of a single worm per vegetable type (it works with moths and butterflies, you see, but not with slugs and snails). So instead of seeing the nightly annihilation as evidence of a single, burgeoning population, we wrongly attributed it to numerous small worms and we were hoping that, after our initial sacrificial harvest, that the predator which preys upon whatever noo-noo scoffs our grub would soon appear. That was the theory, anyway. 

Certainly, it worked with a variety of insects; first we saw the pumpkin beetles and later on a larger beetle, clad in orange and iridescent jade, was espied with the remains of a pumpkin beetle peeping out from either side of her mandibles. Similarly, the spiders, ants and praying mantises all made their appearance, over time, and have stayed and their populations expanded.

However, in all fairness to us, we initially had released a pair of painted quails to combat the worms, and by default, they were also putting paid to the slug and snail problem we never realised we had. You see, the problem with a monkey proof cage, is it is also a bird-proof one, so all the little noo-noos and goggatjies that the birds usually eat were left to breed unhindered. Hence, the suggestion that a little pair of quails would soon dispatch our worm problem (the cabbage worms in particular are such blighters, they eat the youngest leaves, and even if you destroy them, you usually destroy the plant in the process with your thick, clumsy fingers).

Given that we had in essence this very large cage, we were happy to report that all worms were summarily dealt with by our delightful pair, who grew fat and happy on the proceeds, started laying eggs all over the garden, and then settled down to nest-making and breeding, and it was heart-warming at dawn, when I cycled out, to hear the little cock make a strange, strangulated cry which it took me a while to work out was him crowing in the mornings to welcome in the sun. 

But one day, while the female was busy sitting on a clutch-full of eggs, we arrived to find them nowhere to be found. A great mystery, in that the entire area is fenced and we found no evidence of their deaths, but then again, it is a large area, filled with burgeoning plant life. It was gravely disappointing, and it was only since that time that our snail population got out of control, but I refused to purchase more until such time as we worked out what had happened.

The other day, I happened to see our black cat, Clovis - so named by my eldest since "he is black like a clove" - butting the entrance door open. Ha! I figured - that's what it is. So we went and put the door onto a very stiff set of springs, such that in the unlikely event the door is not locked (we have a special pin for it) the cat cannot get in. So we purchased another little pair, only to discover the remnants of one bird (its head and some body organ) after the second night only - and the other nowhere to be found.

That was this last weekend. We have two possibilities: a large rat, or, more likely a genet, but our money is on the genet, little, beautiful, nocturnal deliverer of death: nature remains very red in tooth and claw in Africa. Although the apertures of the wire cage are not large, this small predator is remarkably slinky, and any tiny aperture into which its head can fit is fair game, and it makes more sense since the feed has been undisturbed. Such is the price we pay for the privilege of being so close to a Nature Reserve even though we are in the middle of suburbia. I know my aunt who grew up on a farm had muttered to us about enclosing the cage further, but to clad it all in a second layer of wire, this time chicken mesh, is time-consuming and expensive. Sigh -

But now we realise my daughter's guinea-pig and son's rabbit are in danger, so, last night, with memories of my grandma's exasperation at the uselessness of chickens, and their stupidity with regard to never learning that, nightly, they were always herded into a small area for their own good, we are having to adopt all the old farming tricks - locking away all animals at dusk into small cages so they can survive the night, since my daughter's guinea pig and son's rabbit also live in the garden. And it was with a frisson of fear that I saw night fall and bethought me of all the predators that love to lurk in the dark. 

So for the moment, we are doing relatively poorly as farmers, but can pride ourselves at having the best-fed slugs, snails, cut-worms, aphids, beetles, ants, mole rats, spiders, guinea pigs and rabbits in our area - trust me, I know no-one else who feeds their guinea pigs freshly harvested organic carrots (though, truth to be told, it's only because my daughter insists on giving Bella her guinea pig the best, we are far more hard-hearted in that respect).

But therein lies the rub, you see - once you have this little microcosm of a busy world of growing things, and espy new colonies breeding and small worlds happening, it really is just such a joy to witness, even though it comes with a penalty in terms of harvests. And although you could argue that humility is good for the soul, I must admit that harvesting snails at night is not my favourite activity and I am hence intent on persuading my husband to build us a nice little hok (cage) into which we can shepherd a set of quails nightly. But although I have examined the snail bait on the shelves on occasion, I am pleased to report that I have not succumbed to the temptation and that, thanks to our nightly exertions, for the first time we are able to harvest snow peas, cabbages and spinach:

Snow peas: our August harvest

However, if anyone knows where I can purchase a giant carnivorous snail which preys on other snails, I'm definitely in the market.

Update: having figured out that bantam hens are lethal on snails, amongst other things, we have now installed some in the garden:

The bantams have, indeed, proved to be death on the snails. They also proved to be death on the plants. We do have a chicken tractor (mesh cage with an open bottom) which we can use to take them about from place to place in the garden, however, leaving them in our vegetable garden for about 8 weeks while we were building their outside coop proved sufficient to get rid of the snail population, and we let them in on about a weekly basis for a few hours, as a tret, to ensure the snail population is kept in check.

However, we now finally are beginning to have harvests of rocket, lettuce, basil and the like: