[Closed] Snails...

You know, I was going to ask the same question. I've never had snails in my back yard before; this year I've got dozens of the buggers.

One of our ducks is currently convalescing with a bad leg. Each evening when I take the dogs out for their last walk I take a plastic pot and fill it with slugs and snails. And serve cold for a ducks breakfast next morning 🙂 Getting harder to find any now after a week or so

Make a beer trap. They die happy.

Or leave an area of grass covered in black plastic overnight. Then remove in the morning and all the slugs and snails underneath will *disappear.

*any very happy and full looking thrushes you may see are purely coincidental. But for song thrushes I have a number of square edged proud standing stones around the beds. They make great battering point for thrushes and are often surrounded by remnants of brayed snail shell.

We had a similar issue with slugs. They would get into the house as well...we moved.

Snails seem much nicer though. I used to have a racing snail. Spent ages trailing him and looking for marginal gains. I even removed his shell. Unfortunately, it just made him sluggish.

Three very mild winters have resulted in a bit of a Gastropodian population boom.
A nice way to shift them is to habitually feed them all of your suitable kitchen waste in one spot of the garden, then every few nights collect as many as possible in a plant pot and take them for a walk somewhere nice to a new home.

...or get ducks.

I took the shell off of a snail to see if it would move any faster, but if anything it made it more sluggish.

Is there an echo in here?

That'll teach me not to read the thread and use my one and only joke 😳

It's echoy because of the two empty shells.

Didnt actually know i had snails until i re-did the garden and put some new plants in.
A week later, a couple of mauled lupins and around 70 snails in the garden waste bin and i appear to have finally got rid of most of them.

You can't really blame them for being fat and slow, the clue's in the name...

Gastropod, foot obsessed by food.

Instead of slug / snail pellets you could try Nematodes

Similar theory to cdoc. Plant a French marigold or two. In the morning it'll be covered in the buggers. Remove, rehome, repeat.

Or get a toad.

Hmm. So the solution is to collect them all and give them a new home?

Maybe I'll just keep tip-toeing round them and hope they go away.

How do you get rid of them - humanely?

Initially I tried to be humane, collecting them up first thing...

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After the third day, I just made it rain blue pellets from Wilkos.

Garlic. butter and white wine?

Collect them every morning and evening. Don't put them somewhere else in the garden to be humane they can travel remarkably big distances. If you're as wimpy as me add them to the green bin.

If you're as wimpy as me add them to the green bin

The recycling bin?

Yep, they'll come back as compost in the next life

What did the snail say when it climbed onto the back of a tortoise?
"Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"

Don't poison them if there are hedgehogs about. You'll end up killing the cure!

For some reason, the dog eats them.

Changed her worming tablets to take this into consideration, else pooch is at risk from lungworm.

We do feed her, honest

Onzadog +1

If your going to kill them off use Nematodes rather than poison

Don't poison them if there are hedgehogs about. You'll end up killing the cure!

A couple of years back, I threw down some pellets to get rid of a load of slugs. Then spent the next week picking dead birds out of the yard.

It's amazing to go out on a damp summer evening and see all the snails on the lawn, I woke my eldest son up to come out with me and count them all be we gave up at over 50. Never occurred to me to want to get rid of them though - what harm do they do?

Stevet1 - Member
It's amazing to go out on a damp summer evening and see all the snails on the lawn, I woke my eldest son up to come out with me and count them all be we gave up at over 50. Never occurred to me to want to get rid of them though - what harm do they do?

You don't have any hosta in your garden then ?[img] [/img]

How do you get rid of them?

[img] [/img]

what harm do they do?

I'd hide, I can hear the audience of Gardener's Question Time coming for you.

wang em as far as you can along the back gardens, at night.

Mrs Z hunts slugs by torchlight in the evenings.

Picks them up in rubber gloves, slips the glove off when her hands full and ties them up.

Don't want the buggers coming back after all that effort.

Throw them into the neighbour's garden seems to be a common method of dealing with them.

Or do what Gordon does

If you have a neighbour as selfish as I do who leaves their bin out because they're too lazy to move it to the bin area, then collect half a dozen or so slugs/snails and put them on the bin top then sprinkle round the top of the bin with salt.