Organic Gardening

Olga Schifani & Amy S. Duggan, are vegan organic farmers, educators, and activists. They started the Center for Vegan Organic Education, a subscription farm on Vashon Island, Washington in 1998 and have created the Center for Vegan Organic Education, a non-profit organization to teach people to garden using vegan organic methods and to help people reconnect to their food source.

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Question:

I have a problem with snails in my garden- is there a vegan option that I don't have to share my lettuce with them?

Answer:

Snails and their cousins, slugs, are hermaphroditic. That means they possess both female and male sex organs and can mate with any other slug. By the time these little critters are only a few months old they start to lay hundreds of eggs that hatch in only three weeks. And I though Jurassic Park was scary. Snails and slug like damp shaded areas. Both prefer to eat at night.

Here are some tips to minimize snail damage. Keep your garden area free of clippings and other decomposing plants - pick up the piles of weeds you've pulled and put them in your compost. This will create fewer places for them to hide. They also prefer to eat decomposing plants.

There are many non-toxic ways to deal with snails and slugs. The first is hand picking. Get a flashlight headband and go out after dark and pick away. Move the snails to a place far away from the garden area. You can take two 2x4 and fashion a tent out of them, put it in the garden, and the snails will be hiding under it in no time. They will be easy to find for handpicking

Copper gives snails and slugs a little electrical shock that repels them. I put little copper collars around my tender young starts and have actually witnessed slugs starting to crawl up the copper and turn around. You can get a thin copper sheet at your local hardware store.

A final suggestion is to go ahead and share a little of your lettuce with them. I always grow a little extra for my garden visitors, that way I get what I need and there is some for them too. Just a reminder, snail and slug bait is highly poisonous to small children and pets. There are plenty of other ways to control snails and slugs without using poisons.

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