This morning I overslept, so I didn’t get out into the yard until 6:15 AM to commence the gastropod picking.
Either someone got to them before me, or there just aren’t many left in the parts of the yard I am actively patrolling.
Category Archives: Garden
Snail eradication (day 6).
This morning’s garden foray was weird.
Where were all the gastropods?
Snail eradication (day 5).
Today, I may have picked slightly more slugs than snails. And, in the process of acquainting myself with the ways of the slug, I discovered a very good reason to perform early-morning gastropod removal as a solo activity:
The ethics of snail eradication.
In the comments of one of my snail eradication posts, Emily asks some important questions:
I’m curious about how exactly you reason the snail-killing out ethically alongside the vegetarianism. Does the fact that there’s simply no other workable way to deal with the pests mean the benefits of killing them outweigh the ethical problems? Does the fact that they’re molluscs make a big difference? Would you kill mice if they were pests in your house? If you wanted to eat snails, would you? Or maybe the not-wanting-to-kill-animals thing is a relatively small factor in your vegetarianism?
Snail eradication (day 4).
This morning, it seems like the pickings were somewhat slimmer.
How does salt melt snails?
In light of our recent snail eradication project:
Why does salt “melt” snails and slugs? (And how do people manage to prepare escargot without ending up with a big pot of goo?)
To answer this question, let us consider the snail as seen by the chemist:
Snail eradication (day 3).
Today was the first school day of our snail eradication project. This meant I had to get out to the yard a bit earlier (just after 6 AM), and that I had a fairly limited time to pick slugs and snails before I needed to get inside to propel the sprogs school-ward.
Snail eradication (day 2).
This was another early morning out in the garden picking snails. It was, however, markedly yuckier than yesterday’s foray.
Spring keeps on springing (audience participation edition).
It would appear that our rainy season is really over until next winter (which is not to say that it won’t rain at all between now and then, just that things will be more dry than wet). So, it seemed like a good time to document some recent developments in the Free-Ride garden.
Today, I’m presenting six photos from the garden for you to identify:
- Common name is fine — no need to provide the Linnaean binomial unless you really feel like it.
- No, I’m not asking you to identify these plants because I’ve forgotten what I’ve planted. (Not this time, anyway.)
- Your identifications will germinate (harden-off? compost?) in comment moderation until Monday night (9 PM PST, to be precise), so there’s no need to worry that your comment will spoil the fun for others who want to guess.
- If you have a favorite recipe that uses one or more of these mystery crops and you’d like to share, that would be awesome.
And now for the photos: