applesnail Posted June 8, 2011 (edited) my bad my apologies there amazonian....damn forum names can never tell whos who!helps if one reads the left hand side of the screen! Edited June 8, 2011 by applesnail Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderIdeal Posted June 8, 2011 oh also beer. Snails looovvveee beer. They get pissed in it and die, or so goes thw myth. not 100% sure but i think you'd need to set it up to drown them. they are attracted to the yeast, it's good for them, but they drown easily, they breathe through a single hole between the foot and the shell opening. interesting fact: about a third of a snails energy goes into producing the mucous secreted by their foot, making the snails method of locomotion the most energetically costly of all known life forms. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Amazonian Posted June 8, 2011 my bad my apologies there amazonian....damn forum names can never tell whos who!helps if one reads the left hand side of the screen! No worries there applesnail .I have been called things a lot worse than "HE" you know . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bogfrog Posted June 9, 2011 this mite be a stab in the dark, but i have heard of formic acid (found around ant nests..its their poo. just looks like nice red-brown soil) being used as a natural insecticide. it cracked me up seeing Bear Grills rubbing ant poo all over his face and clothes to protect from mozzies! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nano Posted June 14, 2011 try putting saw dust around the plants you want to protect,works for me. it gets stuck on the snails and they dont like that.. i re- apply some dry saw dust if conditions are a bit wet Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ubza_1234 Posted June 14, 2011 i always thought formic acid was ant venom, not ant poo :S i could be wrong tho... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Zaka Posted June 26, 2011 i always thought formic acid was ant venom, not ant poo :S i could be wrong tho... Irie, That's what I thought too! Anyway not sure if it could be collected by chucking a bunch of ants into a ziplock then shaking the hell out of them???? We have some big ass ants here that when you squash 'em you can smell the formic! The bite is like you've just stepped on a 6" nail! Respect, Z Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tripsis Posted June 26, 2011 In nature, it is found in the stings and bites of many insects of the order Hymenoptera, mainly ants. Wiki. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
lophty_tricho Posted June 27, 2011 Coffee grinds spread at the bace of the plants can be effective in warding off those slugs and snails, they hate caffeine Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bogfrog Posted July 5, 2011 do snails drown easily? i just had a thought of anti snail moats around my plants. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Evil Genius Posted July 6, 2011 Yeah bogfrog, they drown easily. Best liquid to drown em in is in beer. Maybe you can ask a local bar to collect some waste beer for you because you need quite an amount. You have to change the beer water regularly if you dont want fuzzy looking molds growing all over. bye Eg Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CβL Posted July 7, 2011 Thanks for all the replies everyone. But still the fundamental problem remains - I will be away for months at a time, and anything that requires monitoring isn't quite what I had in mind. What I might do in absence of some traditional folk remedy, is to find some foul smelling plants and test them (somewhat scientifically) for snail repellent properties. Alternatively, if there's a weedy plant that snails will eat, but then will die from - that too would work. I'll do some research and see what I turn up. Here's a start - list of supposed poisonous plants to snails: http://petsnails.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=habitat&action=print&thread=4756 ... Snails ate some Oleander, and didn't really care (the people who then ate the snails did care though): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17137529 unrelated but very interesting: Australian doctors issued a warning in October 2003 about eating slugs after a Sydney college student contracted a potentially fatal brain disease when he swallowed some slugs on a dare. Tests found the man's meningitis was caused by a worm normally seen in rat lungs but carried as larvae in slugs and snails. The worm caused the brain lining to swell, forcing doctors to drain fluid from inside the man's skull. He was hospitalized for 17 days with brain lesions. It was five months before he could resume his studies. A friend of the student also ate some raw slugs as part of the dare but threw them up, losing the bet.The doctors said there had been numerous cases of meningitis since 1971 caused by people eating garden snails or slugs. One child died after eating snails and one patient contracted meningitis after eating lettuce covered with snail slime, according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia. http://anpsa.org.au/APOL7/sep97-4.html The known plant toxins are part of a group of chemicals known as secondary compounds or metabolites because they are not essential to the basic bio-chemistry of the plants. They include such things as waste products, storage products and flower pigments as well as growth inhibitors and toxins against predators. The caboxyatractylosides in noogoora burr (Xanthium pungens) seeds probably function to inhibit the growth of other plants which may compete with young burrs. These toxins will severely damage the liver of animals which eat them. They are also found in the native Wedelia asperrima which is known to poison sheep in northern Queensland. The cyanogenic glycosides in many plants including native or spotted fuchsia (Eremophila maculata) and native birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus australis) liberate cyanide when the plant tissue is damaged and kill insects, snails or slugs feeding on them. The same process may kill domestic animals as well. Hmmm... So not quite as easy as I had hoped after a bit of searching. But I'm sure that snails have an Achille's heel. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
incognito Posted July 7, 2011 beer works fine. fill up empty margarine containers scatter amongst ur plants, leave and forget. also that diatomaceous (spelling?) earth shit that u could sprinkle on surface of plant soil. i imagine it would shred a snails foot like a cheese grater, rather barbaric. i hate handling it, would rather the beer method. a couple snails around dont hurt established plants. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
niggles Posted November 28, 2011 I forgot about this thread and I was talking about my snail problem elsewhere. Massive snail and slug infestation in my garden, I got sick of it when they started getting stuck into all my cacti. Since then I have tried a variety of things... -Ground up shells around the base of cactus did not seem to help. -Human hair around seedlings was only a deterrant and slowed them down a little bit. -Beer or yeasty water in buckets attracted slugs and snalis, but didnt kill them in the numbers i needed. -spraying surfaces with caffeiene didnt seem to help (using 6x no-doz in 1litre of water, although it did seem to kill them eventually if sprayed directly onto the snail. -hand picking approx 12 buckets of snails and drowning them in yeast was waaay too time consuming, and the slugs continued to be a big problem. - stomping wiht gumboots in the rain was possibly the most effective method so far. We are currently waiting on a delivery of Diatemacious earth which im told should fix the problem, regardless of wet or dry weather conditions. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
zelly Posted November 28, 2011 a snail will not cross a ring of copper tube or copper foil tape, & I suspect the same could be said for slugs. the copper adversely reacts with their mucus they produce. & fwiw- a ring of copper tubing, 30 cm in diameter, with a small air gap between the two ends of the loop, acts like an oscillator, channeling EM waves to the plant in the middle of the copper loop. aka Lakhovsky Coil Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderIdeal Posted November 29, 2011 are you suggesting those EM waves affect the plant? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CβL Posted November 29, 2011 (edited) It's an electrolytic reaction that deters the slugs/snails (probably feels like sucking a battery). They definitely don't like copper. But copper also has the problem of becoming dulled and oxidized, and then it's not effective anymore either. I don't know the timeframe of this, but I think I read it was only a few weeks/months. Then you need to scour the copper and it's back to full kryptonite power. Also, large slugs are known to just go straight across if they are too stupid to turn back, and then may become trapped in the pot. The new idea I have is to build some kind of one-way enclosure where they can enter, but never leave. A hotel snailifornia, if you will. Edited November 29, 2011 by βluntmuffin Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Heretic Posted December 1, 2011 Would birds eat poisoned snails lying around ? Hate the notion of innocent victims . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
