![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/snail-150x149.png\" "\\"snail\\"")
One of the downsides of gardening in an urban concrete yard is the constant battle against snails. The damage they can wreak is heartbreaking. Like the time that K transplanted his cherished carrot seedlings to a larger pot outside and, the very next morning, all that was left was a clump of bare 1 inch high stems.<\/p>\n
You name it — I’ve tried it. I’ve planted garlic around high risk plants and I’ve run a snail pub (note: they don’t like lager). I have got snail hunting down to a fine art but I seem to have SAS snails around here. All of the books & sites suggest drowning the captured snails in a bucket of water but these snails (a) refused to be drowned even after 5 minutes and (b) escaped out of any water-filled container unless watched constantly.<\/p>\n
In short, nothing seemed to have an effect short of poison — which I broke out again last week after they completely demolished 9 out of the 10 sunflower seedlings I planted out. But I really don’t like using something that is dangerous to humans or other wildlife (a legacy from having 3 toddlers).<\/p>\n
I heard a few years ago that there was a safe snail bait called “Sluggo” in the US which is just iron phosphate but I couldn’t find it in the UK. After the recent sunflowers incident, I started googling again. This time, I found a UK version by a company called Bayer. Bought a bottle via eBay which arrived a few days later & started using it straight away. Planted some seedlings out the following week & 48 hours later they were still untouched.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’ve finally found something that will help but that I won’t feel too bad about using.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the downsides of gardening in an urban concrete yard is the constant battle against snails. The damage they can wreak is heartbreaking. Like the time that K transplanted his cherished carrot seedlings to a larger pot outside and, the very next morning, all that was left was a clump of bare 1 inch high stems. You name it — I’ve tried it. I’ve planted garlic around high risk plants and I’ve run a snail pub (note: they don’t like lager). I have got snail hunting down to a fine art but I seem to have SAS snails around…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1584"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1950,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions\/1950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}