Yes, folks, that’s right.  Not even *I* would have believed THAT many.  I spent not quite 3 more hours today picking up more than 1,200 additional Decollate Snails in really just a small patch of the yard.  That brings my total to now 1,600 snails !

You might think I stopped because it was getting harder and slower to find them, but you’d be dead wrong.  After each 100 collected, I’d come back to the porch, dump them in the terrarium, and head back out in to the yard finding even as many as 10 more right at the same first small patch of ground I started at LAST dump, just a 10-15 minutes earlier!

No, kids… the reason I stopped is because, quite honestly… I just got tired of counting snails!  After 3 hours and 1,600 snails I bet you would too.

I took some pictures, and some video, and will have them posted soon. Time to just RELAX a little for now.

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.