GASTROPODS AND GARDENING IN GASCONY

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.