Orchard Training Homeschool Garden Club - Slugs and Snails

Last week as part of the RHS Campaign for School Gardening they are focusing on Slug and Snails. As keen naturalist, we are joining some of the activities. We have down loaded their Making Friends with Molluscs Gardening with Slugs and Snails booklet, and we already love the slug and snail identification chart in the middle. We do love a good well laid out identification chart.

As we have, in the past, had whole rows of seedlings whipped out with slug and snail feasting away, we are not so convinced that we need to encourage them in to the garden. However, I am happy to learn more about living with them, what about the rest of us?

Over the last few years, we have adapted what we grow to encourage in birds, butterflies, pollinators and hedgehogs, and I know that both hedgehogs and song thrushes like to snack up a few tasty slugs and snails. So, we will have to tolerate some in the garden to attract the visitors we do want to come. We will have to hear what everyone else thinks about this, once they have read the booklet.

In the meantime, we are planning a night time slug and snail safari, we have some torches and magnifying glasses and the guide. We just need some new batteries and we are good to go. It has been suggested that we look around the Orchard Training Homeschool Garden and then we take a walk in to the local woodland so that we can compare between the controlled and uncontrolled environments.

The last thing we need to do is to make some treats to eat after our safari, happy to see ladybird biscuits and snail sweet rolls and slug cupcakes as long as nobody is actually making them with beetles, slugs and snails!

Because it was very difficult to photograph the slugs and snails at night, I have popped around the spots where we found the snails in our homeschool garden and took a few snaps. Big worry is we found them all near our pots which we are going to be planting up soon.