GASTROPODS AND GARDENING IN
GASCONY
On Saturday I felt well for the
first time in 2 weeks and summer happened.
We gardened.
I collected a bucketful of snails
from around the compost heap and John and I wondered about eating
them.
At the kitchen sink later, I saw two
heads ducking below the window along our back wall. Gerard, our
neighbour, had warned us earlier about local thieves so I jerked the
window open and asked what was going on.
Two men smiled up at me - they were
collecting snails.
“Oh good!” said I. “Tell me
how to keep them, feed them, prepare them, and purge them.”
In the end they took away the snails
I had collected and offered to bring me snail soup made with vinegar
and vegetables. Claudine tells me that this is a Basque/Spanish
recipe. The soup will be at least 3 weeks away if the process of
raising snails is followed. I must find out about their nutritional
value.
I don't use pesticides or slug
pellets and giant red Spanish slugs destroy much that I
plant even though I make extensive use of beer traps.
Gardening was impossible while it
rained so hard and so continuously because of the jelly-like state of
the clay on which we live. Impossible to mow the plot so we just enjoy the dandelions - we can eat them too. I haven't yet.
This week John has started on the
repair of the raised beds in the potager. It will be a two
year project we think. I have dug in my green manure and planted
potatoes, onions and beans and a few store-bought salad plants. I
also am planting my courgettes inside bottomless plastic buckets that
once held fat balls for birds.
Hope this protects against slugs
too.
My strawberries are into a third
anti-slug plan and being grown on window boxes on an escalier this
year. I hope it works! I reckoned the cost of the escalier
was the less than the cost of building one ourselves.
Oh and what a delight! This year we
have tadpoles both frog and toad. Do goldfish eat them?
Our moles appear to have all drowned
this year or moved miles away to higher ground. As they did not seem
to have much impact on the slug population I will enjoy not having
molehills everywhere for a while but I expect they will return.
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