Some of you might know that I keep my yard… well… “natural” to say the least.  Even though I live in a well established city neighborhood I have not mowed my lawn for about 3 years.  (More about the yard in another post).  The main point here is that I’ve been putting out my new garden plants, and have discovered some of them totally “missing” just 2 days later!  — Like someone came by and kicked them down and ground level, flinging the top of the plant some distance away (never to be seen again)!  The next day the same thing to ANOTHER new little pepper plant!  Finally I caught the villain(s).  Decollate Snails!  Normally these little guys are suppose to be a positive thing in controlling Garden Snail population, which can be very destructive to your garden.  They love to munch on other snails, but will eat decaying organic matter, and even small garden plants when their main prey is not found.  Since I seem to have exactly the right breeding ground for them, I have obtained an OUTRAGEOUS population!

After the raping and murder of several of my new baby Habanero Pepper plants and reading some general pages spewing “snails are pests”, I started to round them up.  Not wanting to just outright squash their tender little bodies, I decided to throw them in a terarrium I have, toss in my vegitable food waste and some handfulls of pulled weeds, and hope they will turn it all in to good mulch.  We shall see.

For the SHOCK value, I took some pictures of just how many I collected for a few minutes.   This first picture is about a cup size of decollate snails I rounded up in about 15-20 minutes… AFTER I had already rounded up probably more than 100.  It wasn’t until this point I thought “HOLY SMOKES there are a lot of snails in my yard!  I oughtta take a picture of this!”

This next picture is what I rounded up the next morning.  The same cup size, but it only took my about 7 minutes before heading off to work.  I’ll also note it had rained that night, and could be another reason I got SO many SO fast!

I’ll have new pictures of the terrarium this weekend.

I bought some new plants for my vegetable garden (and yard) this weekend, including some onion sets. I was (am) hoping to plant them in various places around the yard and let them grow wild, however, I did a little research today and it seems that might not happen on its own. There’s good indication that I’ll have to buy seeds again each year. I DID run across something that sounds much better. Egyptian Walking Onions are perennial, easy to grow, self-seeding and I found a cool forum and people from Spicewood and San Antonio TX have been very pleased with them! The online seed shops seem to only ship these guys in late fall, so I’ll either have to wait until then, or find someone else.

According to Gary Robert’s page, it seems like the Catawissa strain might be the best of the Egyptian Walking Onion modifications as they are taller, produce slightly larger top-sets, and the top-sets are spicy.

Egyptian Walking Onions are much smaller bulbs than most other onions, and they offer the double bonus of forming smaller bulblets on top of their stems in clusters, a kind of strange flower head. You can eat either end, but usually you eat the bulbs from the ground and plant the bulblets for more onions. They get the moniker Walking because if you don’t harvest the bulbs, these perennial plants will walk their way across your garden.