We need more frost!

Or at least I do! The snails, and particularly the slugs, who sailed through last winter’s wet but not particularly cold weather, are out in force this October. My winter chard is suffering, not least because I was away for the weekend and once all the first wave of gastropods had eaten my organic slug pellets, the second wave crawled in and ate the chard, the swines!

Did you know snails can have hundreds to thousands of teeth! Most mollusc groups, including snails, have a set of teeth that is shaped like a wavy ribbon called a radula. There can be hundreds of rows of teeth and several different tooth types in one snail or very few rows with a single tooth in each. As the teeth get worn they are continuously replaced by developing teeth, much in the same way that a shark's teeth are. These teeth can be used for scraping food such as algae or tugging away small amounts of leaf material.

I’m not a very ruthless pest killer, sadly – I wish I was brave enough to go out and cut slugs in half with a pair of scissors like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, but I’m not. I can’t do beer traps either, as the whole thing is disgusting the next morning when you have to empty it.

There is a bit of a plus side, which is that if you can get your chard to a reasonable size, the snails tend to give up – they don’t like the thickness of the leaves, but given that my chard is still baby chard, they are simply destroying the plants. A damn good frost would sort them out without me having to do anything about it, so I’m hoping for clear nights and low temperatures, otherwise I shall have to get ruthless.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment_pests, winter-allotment