~1490018010~BARTLEBY.qxp_Layout 7 20/03/2017 13:54 Page 1
Snail season
I
’m not sure what attention spam-bots pay to the passing seasons, but I have recently been bombarded by emails offering different kinds of pest control. And, as you read this, one particular pest will be very much on the warpath. Or, should I say, one particular family of pests. Some members of this family have shells, others don’t, but they all share qualities of sliminess and slitheriness, an appetite for tender green shoots and the ability to get from A to B undetected and with surprising speed. Yes, it’s terrestrial gastropod mollusc season once again and now – having wintered safely under a plant pot or down the back of a drainpipe – the slugs and snails are emerging to see what we might have planted for them. In our tiny patch of garden the answer, nowadays, is nothing. I wrote some years ago about a particularly painful experience involving runner bean shoots and a frog that wasn’t doing his job properly, and since then we have resisted planting anything that molluscs enjoy eating. Not that this stops them trying. Sometimes you can actually hear a snail gnawing away at a tulip leaf, a disconcerting sound that makes me glad we live in a world in which we are big and they are small. I say ‘small’, but we once shared a house with a slug that, for several months, moved unseen around the ground floor, his silvery trails the only evidence of his existence. Then one night I came downstairs for something and there he was in the kitchen doorway – a great orange beast at least six inches long, a relative perhaps of the monsters you find on Dartmoor. As his tentacles swivelled towards me, I froze. A slug is not a dangerous animal, I know, but I felt I had crossed the line into his territory. My options were to pick him up and put him in the garden, or leave him to it. I’ll let you guess which one I took…
...The best weapon is a pair of slightly bored under-fives... But it is funny how a simple change in our gardening policy changed molluscs from a major irritant to a minor nuisance. Before that we had tried every deterrent except outright chemical warfare and discovered that the best weapon against slugs and snails is a pair of slightly bored under-fives. You’d be amazed how many slugs a toddler can collect in a bucket, especially when suitably incentivised. An ice pop was worth about 50 snails, I seem to remember, though there was a certain amount of de-sliming to do before the lolly could be consumed. The dog, on the other hand, is absolutely hopeless in this kind of role although, to his credit, the rats seem to have abandoned their home under the compost bin. So far he hasn’t noticed the frog that, as usual, appeared out of nowhere last month and took up residence in the pond, and so long as said amphibian doesn’t hop around too much I don’t think he will. He had a long lecture recently from Ms Bartleby on the subject of bumblebees and how they should be left in peace to do their valuable work “for the sake of the Whole Planet, including You!” – her lectures can be rather ferocious, and he seems to have taken it in. So a kind of balance has been achieved in the miniature world that constitutes our back garden. I can say, hand on heart, that you will never see a petunia or a runner bean out there, but neither will you find a slug pellet. You’re unlikely to spot a cat unless the dog has stolen someone’s birthday cake and sent himself into a diabetic coma, but if, on a still spring evening, you stop and listen outside the back door, you might hear, above the usual sounds of the city, the unmistakeable, monotonous burr of a solitary but optimistic frog, singing. ■ 20 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
|
APRIL 2017