MY WORST ENEMY HAS ARRIVED

It was just a matter of time before we were finally blessed with a good rainfall. In all a total of 3.8" fell over a period of two days. I'm expecting the arrival of plenty of weed seedlings as well as bluebonnets and other spring annuals over the next week. But the one thing I have been dreading is the awakening of the snails after their long summer nap. They have arrived and they are hungry, and not for brown vegetation. They want fresh greens. How perfect was their timing to coincide with the young tender chard and kale leaves, as well as emerging seedlings.
Maybe other gardeners don't bother much about the slugs and snails in their garden. It depends mainly on what you are growing as to whether you will notice their feeding habits. They love vegetables, so those tender seedlings are first and foremost on their menu. But they also love the flowers of the blackfoot daisies as well as seedlings of larkspur and many other annuals-but not nigella (love-in-a-mist). If I sow some seeds directly in the ground I will never see a single plant, so if you ever wonder why a packet of seeds never germinates the snail may be your culprit. The only defense is to cull their numbers dramatically.

I have been out hand picking and have already done away with hundreds. It worries me a little that a new snail has appeared this year... this tiny round one. I am not sure yet if they are just babies but they are more difficult to spot in the gravel and I am not going to let them multiply into great numbers.
The more common ones for me are the decollate snails. When they first appear their shells are complete but wear and tear breaks off the tip.

In the gravel they try to bury themselves but that broken off tips is easy to spot.

 

They gather in large numbers underneath the blackfoot daisies and can shred the flowers overnight.

There are many suggestions for dealing with slugs and snails. Hand picking takes time but is well rewarded. Small containers of beer partly buried in the ground works well. Empty grapefruit halves turned upside down and left overnight will bring them running as well as the pill bugs. Carrot peelings placed under the shelter of a plant will attract them but you have to remember to remove the snails in the early morning before they return to their shelter.
Using baits is the easy way. Sluggo or Sluggo Plus, both certified for use in organic gardens, work really well. The Plus formula also eliminates other pests such as earwigs, pill bugs, army worms and cutworms. But I prefer not to wipe out everything in the garden just to control their numbers we have a reasonable balance.
On to the next pest of the moment. Caterpillars on my vegetables. These little devils have been making lacework out of my curly kale. I have been feeding them to the little fish in my stock tank pond. Talk about piraña activity when I drop them in.

I could spray with Bt but that involves making it up. Just easier to pick them off.

I didn't even notice the nymphs of the leaf footed bugs on the peppers until I looked at the photograph. You can just see them on the largest pepper. I thought they left with the tomatoes.

MAGNIFICENT MANGAVE, MACHO MOCHA MISCHIEF

I think I read somewhere that gardening is the most difficult of the arts. Maybe for some it comes easy but not for this gardener. It is a constant battle with the elements and bugs.

I have been admiring my beautiful Mangave, macho mocha, from a distance, for some time. Yesterday I decided to take a closer view to see if there were offsets waiting to be removed. This is when I spotted that all was not well.

The lower leaves had been stripped of their upper layers; one of those decollate snails was sitting right on top of the leaf. Now the hunt began.

I collected all these snails camping out underneath the plant. All the lower leaves were shredded. I'm now realizing that I have a snail problem in my gravel/rock front garden. Who would have thought.

WHEN GOOD SNAILS GO BAD

Three years ago I was extolling the virtues of the decollate snail, Rumina decollata. You can read the whole story here. 

Conical Rumina decollata

Having discovered several of these conical-shelled snails in my garden in December of 2009, which I promptly disposed of, I headed into the house to do some research. Oh! no, I have killed good snails. These snail eats other snails. My research had taken me to an article which Debra Lee Baldwin had researched for Sunset magazine. I needn't have worried about the loss because once again the snails started showing up in large numbers. I let them go about their business. The small snails, which eat little seedlings and gnaw at the base of violas, soon began to disappear. I was hoping they would eat pill bugs too. All was well, until.....

I was wondering why no larkspur are showing up in the herb beds this year. As I loosened the mulch I came across these tiny white sticks. Then I realized what they were; they were the denuded stems of larkspur. I rooted a little more and found a nest of decollate snails. Very distraught I began gathering them up: rooting through the mulch. Boy there were some woppers.

I began the trapping process the old-fashioned way as my mum did in our garden in England: a tasty grapefruit shell and a little hand picking too. Some I gathered and flung over the wall for the roadrunner. They don't climb, so claims the article. I have disposed of hundreds and from now on no snail shall make its home here. Yesterday, I discovered one had eaten a young bluebonnet seedling. Is that why there are no bluebonnets in the sunken garden this year I wonder.
So I am sorry Debra I beg to differ. Decollate snails do eat seedlings and they do climb: witness the ones hiding in the holes in my limestone boulders. The only way in there is to climb up or down.

Thanks to my friend, at The Transplantable Rose, who suggested the title for this post. I was sharing my story with her when she complained about lost seedlings. "Maybe you have decollate snails" I say. Today she checked and she does, and that's when she gave me the idea for the post title.

GOODNESS GRACIOUS!

Just when I was beginning to think we weren't going to have any bluebonnets this year, we have 3" of rain in one week and kaboom! Hundreds of bluebonnet seedlings germinate. A little relocation may be necessary.

In fact, I had moved a few seedlings the day before and yesterday when I checked them out, this. What on earth has been munching the leaf.

I dug around in the soil and this is what I found.

I thought they were my friends. Two years ago the decollate snail started to show up. Like all snails the numbers of this snail have increased as the numbers of the small round snails, pill bugs and slugs has declined. I am very happy about that but is there so little for them to eat that they are now becoming vegetarian. I may have to reduce their population.

ALWAYS CHECK BEFORE YOU DESTROY

Each year my garden is plagued by snails and pill bugs. For their size, the snails are barely 1/4" in diameter, they certainly can do a lot of destruction. They can home in on the seedlings as they break the surface of the ground and chew away at the lower parts of the stem until the plant just withers away and dies. It isn't true that they only eat decaying material although I'm sure they do their fair share of that too.

So when I spotted one of these while removing some frost damaged vegetation it got a quick crushing. For some reason I knew this was a decollate snail. It is the only snail name I know and I really know nothing about it. All I was thinking was BIG SNAIL. Moving around I came across a small pile of about 8 oak leaves. Since there is no oak tree around I found the pile rather puzzling. Ye gads, underneath were 5 of these snails! Crushed. Now I started to poke around in earnest and found several more. I'm being taken over, I thought. I picked up one to photograph and then went inside and put in 'decollate snail' on google. I was right, Rumina decollata.

What have I done! This is a good snail. He goes around eating all the other snails and slugs. He's a gardener's friend. You can buy him on the internet. Does he eat seedlings too, I wonder?When I find more shall I let them be?

I put back the one I had photographed right next to a big fat slug hiding under the edge of a stone. I hope Rumina had him for supper.