Snails as fertiliser.

[shortly]

I dunno how quails would stand up to stray or feral cats, not to mention any birds of prey that my be around, ya might need a muzzy drake to guard the quails.

Pin as in kill them & then put a ento pin through their thorax & into a mounting board, doesn't work with larvae though, they are better pickled in ethanol.

You might need to dry your specimens either in a dehydrator or in a sealed container with a desiccant. once they are dry put them in a sealed container with desiccant into the freezer for a couple of weeks to kill any eggs of other insects that may be on or in your specimens. For long term storage use naphthalene flakes or balls to deter the inevitable scavengers.

Having grubs bursting out of other insects is so cool

And do get some air circulation happening, mold is nasty.

[ThunderIdeal]

thanks. if drying is about all it takes, i think i'll start a proper collection. i never kill them though, i just find their bodies. actually i've found cool bugs with their insides eaten by ants leaving only a shell.

cats and birds of prey? quail families can be exterminated by ants. i think their environment needs to be well thought out and they need a little network of hollow logs and the such.

circulation is tricky with no fly screens, during a wet mozzie season. i think i figured out that showering with the house sealed up is what made the problem worse. anyway a dodgy frame with fly screen to fit into a couple of windows might be in order.

[santiago]

isnt it interesting you can collect a bucket load of snails and freeze them for pre fertilizer production yet if you were to collect the equivilant say 200 cats that strayed onto your property, froze them and turned them into fertilizer you would probably end up in jail..............with no direct link to you tripsis cos iv stepped on many a snail (accidently) can anybody explain why moralistically its ok to kill an organism because it eats a plant (its natural food) but its not ok to kill a cat which shits and pisses in your garden and eats magpies?

[ThunderIdeal]

just to play the devil's advocate, you might be able to get cat traps from the council, if you catch somebodies cat they will be fined, they may not get two chances etc, in other words there is a lawful way to go about these things. the cat owners are as much in the wrong as a dog owner would be if a dog was on your property.

i dunno where they draw the line! you are supposed to freeze cane toads or apparently the rspca can have you, but cane toads ARE vertebrates.

i don't wanna rant too much but here's the thing, for me. if they came up with a bait that would do the cane toad in, albeit slowly and horribly, they would still use it. yet we aren't allowed to beat a toad over the head. why do i agree with this? if everyone was allowed to go around brutalising vertebrate critters i reckon we'd be breeding a lot of psychopaths, at least giving the nod to vicious behaviour. society makes exceptions where there is a reasonable grounds such as amateur fishing and the livestock industry, but australia does not and should not approve of it's ordinary citizens going around killing animals willy nilly.

[WoodDragon]

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested giving the snails a few weeks to clean out on lettuce and/or oatmeal.

Then add garlic and butter, and mmm-hmmm...

On the matter of roadkill and fertilising, I plant under my fruit trees wallabies, possums, or whatever carcass is at hand at the time of digging the hole. Even a recently-dead chook from the flock will do. Of course, the hole has to be large, but that helps the roots grow too. The trees go hammer and tongs with such a start - when I don't have a carcass to use, the trees take much longer to establish.

[bℓσωηG]

A cat would make a lot more noise than snail when being squashed i'd imagine Santiago....

On the matter of roadkill and fertilising, I plant under my fruit trees wallabies, possums, or whatever carcass is at hand at the time of digging the hole. Even a recently-dead chook from the flock will do. Of course, the hole has to be large, but that helps the roots grow too. The trees go hammer and tongs with such a start - when I don't have a carcass to use, the trees take much longer to establish.

.... there is so much roadkill too where you are in Tassie WoodDragon ,wombats, devils, quolls...

When i kick the bucket i'd be honored if my body was put under a tree or large cactus somewhere it would remain untouched .

Who needs a headstone and coffin when you can give back to a tree?.... The Noongars (some tribes?) have a birth tree that their mothers give birth to under and when that person leaves this earthly dimension his or her body is put back under that very tree, awesome !

Much nicer than being flushed down the loo , which is being proposed by undertakers in Belgium..

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/294482

Edited December 18, 2010 by blowng

[santiago]

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested giving the snails a few weeks to clean out on lettuce and/or oatmeal.

Then add garlic and butter, and mmm-hmmm...

 

yep i thought that was a pretty valid point, would like to try snail myself one day...........vaguely heard that the reason you cant just eat our garden snails is due to parasites or similar, would a snail detox of a month on lettuce and oatmeal totally eliminate any unwanted parasites for example?

[bℓσωηG]

When i got the snail shell shard in my foot i was praying that a rat lung worm wasnt entering my bloodstream lol.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/rat-lungworm-fear-after-slugeating-dare-20100513-uzpj.html

[WoodDragon]

Preparing garden snails for eating

Eating snails

Escargot recipes

Gordon Ramsay cooks 'em!

A funny (and probably ficticious) story

A linky link

Another recipe

I think that everyone'll get the idea! If folk aren't convinced, ogle G00gle.

As to the issue of parasites, yeah, I heard that story. Serves the silly bugger right, eating a raw slug. If folk read the recipes, they'll notice that all involve a lot of cooking - any parasites tend to die when they're cooked!

The important thing is to purge the snails first. Once that's done, they're free protein, and if done with garlic, butter, and herbs, they're delicious!

If I could actually find more than the one or two that usually hide around here, I'd be stuffing myself to the gills with them.

Seriously.

[WoodDragon]

.... there is so much roadkill too where you are in Tassie WoodDragon ,wombats, devils, quolls...

Yes, that's largely a consequence of the state being fox-free until now. If the buggers become established here, it'll be a different story in a few decades.

When i kick the bucket i'd be honored if my body was put under a tree or large cactus somewhere it would remain untouched .

Who needs a headstone and coffin when you can give back to a tree?.... The Noongars (some tribes?) have a birth tree that their mothers give birth to under and when that person leaves this earthly dimension his or her body is put back under that very tree, awesome !

Speaking of birth trees, I took my kids' placentæ home after they were born. The first was put under a ginkgo, and the twins' was stuck under a Wollemi pine. The ginkgo is growing insanely well, but the WP is still sulking, probably because it was rootbound, dried almost to death in the pot on multiple occasions, and not watered well once I put it in the ground. I'll have to work on it over summer, so that the twins don't lose their tree.

I've stopped breeding, because I always said that more than two was too many for the planet (what was the probability of twins second time around?*), but if I lived in a less populated world where another kid was not ecologically dodgey, and another child was on the cards, I'd plant the placenta under a Japanese umbrella pine, to continue the fossil tree theme.

(*For the curious, it's about 1 in 80)

[shortly]

yep i thought that was a pretty valid point, would like to try snail myself one day...........vaguely heard that the reason you cant just eat our garden snails is due to parasites or similar, would a snail detox of a month on lettuce and oatmeal totally eliminate any unwanted parasites for example?

 

i would be extremely cautious eating wild snails even after a month of cleansing.

if you were to use the wild ones as brood stock to produce captive animals however

[bℓσωηG]

http://webecoist.com/2009/11/25/slime-stew-anyone-giant-snails-battle-malnutrition/

Besides providing essential iron and protein, snail meats provides calcium, copper, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, essential fatty acids, and vitamins A, B6, B12 and K. The meat is low in fat but rich in healthy polyunsaturated fat.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjsReAgphEo&feature=player_embedded

Imagine the steaks youd get off these! oh,but imagine one of those buggars on the tip of you bridgey , get the shotgun !

I think id prefer to eat abalone , but i wonder if you could change the flavour of the snail meat by feeding it certain things.

[WoodDragon]

yep i thought that was a pretty valid point, would like to try snail myself one day...........vaguely heard that the reason you cant just eat our garden snails is due to parasites or similar, would a snail detox of a month on lettuce and oatmeal totally eliminate any unwanted parasites for example?

The purging process is about altering, and then completely removing, the stomach contents of the snails. Parasites aren't really the focus in this process. Cooking takes care of parasites.

Of course, there's the possibility that snails might take on-board pesticides and herbicides if these have been used in the area where the snails were collected, or that other chemicals might have accumulated in the snails. If the garden's hemmed in by freeways, or if it's sitting on an old industrial waste site, then it might pay to have an intimate understanding of the local food chain!

Even in the latter case, however, it'd be pretty difficult to scrape together more than a few feeds of snails in any short space of time, so the extra load of nasty chemicals coming in through them would probably not be that great, relatively speaking. If the issue of toxic build-up in general is a significant one though, then it might pay to source snails from a more clean environment. However, if one is in this circumstance, one should probably not even be eating vegetables from the same area as the snails, as their accumulative capacity would not be greater than that of a few human-sized feeds of the vegies upon which the snails would have feasted in the first place...

Personally, I probably wouldn't eat more than a couple of snails from inner-city Sydney, especially if I didn't know that their environment had been clean for a while. On the other hand, I'd happily chomp on just about any Hobart snails, and especially the ones that live in my corner, as it's nasty-chemical free. If only I could collect enough to make it worthwhile...

Edited December 19, 2010 by WoodDragon

[WoodDragon]

Imagine the steaks youd get off these! oh,but imagine one of those buggars on the tip of you bridgey , get the shotgun !

They're monsters, aren't they? Severale native Australian species grow that big, as anyone who lives near rainforest in northern NSW or in Queensland might know. Unfortunately the introduced 'garden' snails have pushed a lot of our native snails toward extinction (just as honey bees have done with our native bee species), so eating native snails would be a biodiversity no-no. It's another reason for feasting on the buggers in your vegie patch!

I think id prefer to eat abalone , but i wonder if you could change the flavour of the snail meat by feeding it certain things.

Yeah, a lot of the reason that snails are delicious is the fact that they're cooked in yummy ingredients! Apparently though they can be flavoured by providing them with dill or other herbs, so this would be a secondary reason for feeding them for a few weeks before cooking them.

Given that they can each fetch a buck or several in restaurants, if I could scrape a bucketful of them out of my garden in just a few hours I'd probably set up a supply business.

Or just eat a lot of snails!

[shortly]

They're monsters, aren't they? Severale native Australian species grow that big, as anyone who lives near rainforest in northern NSW or in Queensland might know. Unfortunately the introduced 'garden' snails have pushed a lot of our native snails toward extinction (just as honey bees have done with our native bee species), so eating native snails would be a biodiversity no-no. It's another reason for feasting on the buggers in your vegie patch!

Yeah, a lot of the reason that snails are delicious is the fact that they're cooked in yummy ingredients! Apparently though they can be flavoured by providing them with dill or other herbs, so this would be a secondary reason for feeding them for a few weeks before cooking them.

Given that they can each fetch a buck or several in restaurants, if I could scrape a bucketful of them out of my garden in just a few hours I'd probably set up a supply business.

Or just eat a lot of snails!

 

You could be right about the Hobart snails woody but given that snails are best only lightly cooked, the risk of schistosomiasis and echinococcosis in tropical areas i'm still very reluctant to muck around with wild snails.

Australia hasn't any land snails that even come close to GALS, at a guess i'd say the giant panda would be one of if not the biggest at 4".

GALS grow to have a shell 14" long and weigh a kg, its no wonder they are farmed for meat overseas.

[tripsis]

Would love to have ducks, quails and chickens roaming the yard one day, but it's not possible for me now.

isnt it interesting you can collect a bucket load of snails and freeze them for pre fertilizer production yet if you were to collect the equivilant say 200 cats that strayed onto your property, froze them and turned them into fertilizer you would probably end up in jail..............with no direct link to you tripsis cos iv stepped on many a snail (accidently) can anybody explain why moralistically its ok to kill an organism because it eats a plant (its natural food) but its not ok to kill a cat which shits and pisses in your garden and eats magpies?

Well for one, killing cats by freezing them in inhumane and you could easily be done for that. If you had a license for a gun or had traps though, I'm sure you'd be allowed to kill cats, providing of course they are feral and not someone's pet pussy, but even then, if they are on your property, they may be considered fair game. Likewise, these (also introduced) snails are on your property, considered a pest and thus fair game.

i dunno where they draw the line! you are supposed to freeze cane toads or apparently the rspca can have you, but cane toads ARE vertebrates.

Vertebrates yes, but they are cold-blooded and are known to not notice changing temps, e.g. if you put a frog/toad in room temp. water, then begin to boil it, it won't react until it feels pain. Likewise, freezing it would probably be the same, although it may not feel pain as it's bodily functions would just be shutting down.

i don't wanna rant too much but here's the thing, for me. if they came up with a bait that would do the cane toad in, albeit slowly and horribly, they would still use it. yet we aren't allowed to beat a toad over the head. why do i agree with this? if everyone was allowed to go around brutalising vertebrate critters i reckon we'd be breeding a lot of psychopaths, at least giving the nod to vicious behaviour. society makes exceptions where there is a reasonable grounds such as amateur fishing and the livestock industry, but australia does not and should not approve of it's ordinary citizens going around killing animals willy nilly.

Agreed, you raise some good and valid points.

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested giving the snails a few weeks to clean out on lettuce and/or oatmeal.

Then add garlic and butter, and mmm-hmmm...

I didn't raise it because I just wouldn't eat snails. Not much is less appealing to me. People should eat them if they want to, but it's just not going to happen for me. I'll eat them indirectly via my plants.

On the matter of roadkill and fertilising, I plant under my fruit trees wallabies, possums, or whatever carcass is at hand at the time of digging the hole. Even a recently-dead chook from the flock will do. Of course, the hole has to be large, but that helps the roots grow too. The trees go hammer and tongs with such a start - when I don't have a carcass to use, the trees take much longer to establish.

This actually reminds me, when I had rats in my last house, I'd toss their bodies into the compst after trapping them. They broke down in matter of days and all that remains for longer were bits of fur.

[tripsis]

the risk of schistosomiasis

Schistosomiasis is not naturalised in Australia as far as I'm aware.

Edited December 19, 2010 by tripsis

[bℓσωηG]

I'll eat them indirectly via my plants.

You mean that extra crunchy salad you make when you thought you washed all the lettuce? I have given up growing lettuce now , it was always covered in slime and several small snails have been inadvertently eaten ewww...

[shortly]

Schistosomiasis is not naturalised in Australia as far as I'm aware.

 

Unfortunately there are isolated cases turn up in the tropics most years, usually from locations with the best fishing.

garden prawns with garlic butter

Edited December 19, 2010 by shortly

[tripsis]

You mean that extra crunchy salad you make when you thought you washed all the lettuce? I have given up growing lettuce now , it was always covered in slime and several small snails have been inadvertently eaten ewww...

I hope that's not what I meant!

Unfortunately there are isolated cases turn up in the tropics most years, usually from locations with the best fishing

Well shit, that's not a disease you'd want a contract. At least it's treatable.

[WoodDragon]

GALS grow to have a shell 14" long and weigh a kg, its no wonder they are farmed for meat overseas.

A 14" shell is effing big alright! When I was doing fieldwork in the Border Ranges I saw a couple of snails the size of the one in the photo and in the vid. Stretched out on the log it was on the body was almost 30 cm long and its shell was about the same size as the one above, although it wasn't as stretched out along the conical axis as the one pictured; it was about 11 cm diametre at the widest point.

Is schistosomiasis a big problem in FNQ, Shortly? Most of the cases I hear about when I was working in clinical pharmacology were in immigrants from tropical countries. I haven't really heard much about it being up in that neck of the woods, and I would have thought that it'd be more likely to occur in water snails than in the land ones? Do the garçons up there ask if sir would like praziquantel with his order?

Echinococcis is definitely present in mainland Australia, although I think that we're still clear of it in Tassie. Are snails an intermediate host though? I thought that mammalian carnivores were the major definitive host, and that mammalian herbivores were the major intermediate hosts. Damn! I ate a lot of snails when I was last in Queensland...

I know that Echinostoma worms are hosted in snails, but they're Asian, aren't they? Fasciola liver flukes are definitely in Australia, and in snails, but their hosts are water snails. The biggest worry that I know of are the Angiostrongylus nematodes, like the sort in Blowng's link above, but I don't think that they're hosted in garden snails.

Hmmm... I think that I'll have to do some reading...

[tripsis]

When I was doing fieldwork in the Border Ranges

Do you mind if I ask what you do WoodDragon? It sounds interesting.

[WoodDragon]

Angiostrongylus worms aren't listed as being hosted by garden snails.

There are many parasites of humans, but not many that seem to use Helix aspersa as a host.

I didn't raise it because I just wouldn't eat snails. Not much is less appealing to me. People should eat them if they want to, but it's just not going to happen for me

.

I hear ya, Tripsis. I only started with snails because I used to go on Friday night restaurant crawls with my mates after work, back in my young days. We'd have a few pints at a local pub to start, and then pick a different place each week at which to eat. Somewhere in the process I boasted that there was nothing I wouldn't try, and one day I was confronted with snails...

Anyway, the brewskies softened my culturally-acquired aversion and made it easier to try them, and afterward I was so taken that I ordered seconds. The first snail took a few minutes to get into my mouth, but by the end I was picking them out of the shells with those little forks and curvy tongs as fast as I could manage.

And yes, they're slippery suckers!

[tripsis]

Fuck....for the record, it appears that freezing snails does not actually kill them. That pot pictured was frozen until all the snails were hard and cold, frozen with their eyes half out of their heads, etc. Thinking them dead, I took them out onto the deck, photographed them and then forgot about them for the next couple of days (went camping so couldn't do anything until today). Well, I went out to toss them into the compost, opened the lid and....they were all alive! They had been in that pot for almost two full days baking in the sun, after being frozen solid and they were still alive! What was an attempt at a pain-free death has turned into some awful torture experiment! Gah, I feel terrible!!! I ended it all with boiling water...

Well, it's good you can eat them Woody, to each their own. I don't drink, so can't see me drunkenly ending up gorging on them one day. Much better suited to fertiliser in my eyes.

[WoodDragon]

Gee, tripsis, those snails of your were tough buggers!

I am not really surprised though, because they are very mucilaginous animals, so they're loaded with antifreeze, or at least with a form of cryoprotectant. Don't worry about having tortured them - they would likely just have shut down for the duration, and not really perceived much beyond things cooling down to the point where they went sleepy-bye-byes and then woke up again.

Boiling is quick too, but I have to confess that I would hesitate myself at that point, out of sookiness. Once they were cooked though, I'd be happy to pop them into my mouth! It's a shame that we are not geographically close, because I'd happily take them off your hands.