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Snails

James_H

James_H

And I like to roam the land
Joined
May 18, 2002
Messages
7,629
yesterday night i went to see a film. walking, on the way back, the ground was damp, but there weren't many snails. and then i came to a pavement which was literally covered in snails... a section of it *bad at estimating* some 2 and a half metres long with snails no further than 6 inches apart. past this bit the snails were few and far between again. freaked me out.:eek!!!!:
 
Snails. Strange little buggers. I have noticed in my well chewed garden there seem to be fashionable sleeping places for them which vary every year. Last year my artichoke was always covered in them (although they don't eat it), this year there are hardly any on there- they're all on the fennel (which they also never eat). Then they all come out at dusk and go to dinner somewhere else.
 
There was a comedy about Snails on radio Four last year the hero(??) ended in the garden shed wearing a grey track suit and a brown rucksack. Quite weird, quite funny and i wish they would repeat it.
 
...and how come they climb trees and walls in summer?
Every year I find them...sealed in and swinging from the shrubs!
I even had one take up residence outside my loo window!( 30 feet up!).
Weird!
 
Apologies in advance to Escargot

I hear that the French feed them on lettuce before cooking them.

This apparently makes them less poisonous or something...
 
snails ......

David Raven said:
...and how come they climb trees and walls in summer?
Every year I find them...sealed in and swinging from the shrubs!
I even had one take up residence outside my loo window!( 30 feet up!).
Weird!
Click to expand...

Found two baby ones stuck firmly to my car the other day (well, I didn't find them - someone else did)
 
I've got one above my radiator. I assume it's a bit toasted by now. God know how it got in!
 
Faggus,
Your Avatar pic is from the Wicker Man - Have you seen the restored version? This includes the famous "snail sex scene" which was cut from the original release.

That of course reminds me of the special edition of Spartacus which had the "Snails and oysters" scene restored.

Does anyone know if the BBFC has a special Snail section?
 
I watched the 'snails and oysters' scene in Spartacus and, fully briefed and forewarned as I was, it still baffled me. Lord knows why it was ever banned in the first place!

Snails make excellent pets. I've described elsewhere how to keep them so I won't repeat myself, but I'm pleased to mention again the happy time I spent with a young nephew attempting to feed a snail a sugar strand. When we eventually positioned it correctly, it looked just like a cigarette hanging out of its gob. We laughed till we cried and he still can't describe it to anyone because he just breaks down again.
 
snail sex scene

In the film, someone is sent up by the lord of the island to have sex with someone... As this takes place, The lord watches snails having sex and makes a speech about how he would prefer to be an animal...
 
Where i live the walls are built from granite stones encasing an earth centre around all our gardens and there are millions of the little buggers ( and some quite big!) as well as whopping snails living in the cracks. It's always damp in Kernow and at night i can actually hear them all eating my plants... a chorus of rasping sounds.Sorry esc. i've ordered some hedgehogs!
 
When I was at University four female friends of mine who shared a house got pissed with me and a couple of other mates and decided, as you do, to hit the Ouija board. Now I'm generally not very superstitious or nervous about much but for reasons I don't particularly want to go into I will under absolutely no circumstances get involved with a Ouija board, so I went home.

The following morning I was phoned by a pretty shaken up girl who asked me to go back round to the house. During the previous evenings session the participants had supposedly made contact with something. When asked its name it replied "Legion" (corny I know) and when asked where it was it replied "under the floor".

Now I had my doubts as one of the guys that had been involved was a notorious and occasionally cruel bullshitter and there was a running joke about the one or two slug trails that occasionally appeared in the morning on the living room carpet. We assumed the slugs lived under the carpet somewhere. Anyway, like any decent knight in shining armour, despite the hangover, I went around to the house prepared to calm everyone down and hopefully get fed. I was ushered into the living room which had been the site of the previous nights experience and shown the site which had greeted the girls that morning when they surfaced. Between the sofa and the back window, an area about three metres square, was an assorted mass of slugs and snails, hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of the little buggers. It never happened again I’m glad to say, especially as I was delegated the job of rounding them up and putting them in the back garden.
 
Eat the little buggers. A great base for other flavours.

Soak them in a bucket of water for a few days first. Then cook them in olive oil and garlic.

I'll post further details if anyone is interested.

:D
 
beer traps

brian ellwood said:
Where i live the walls are built from granite stones encasing an earth centre around all our gardens and there are millions of the little buggers ( and some quite big!) as well as whopping snails living in the cracks. It's always damp in Kernow and at night i can actually hear them all eating my plants... a chorus of rasping sounds.Sorry esc. i've ordered some hedgehogs!
Click to expand...

Does anyone know if beer traps work for snails as well as slugs? If I put a beer bottle in my binbag, it looks like a scene from a horror movie in the morning! Slugs 5 deep and fighting to get inside the black plastic <yuk>
 
I once saw a French exchange teacher misinterpret the converstion, as follows-

Teacher 1- ' What CAN you do with snails and slugs? Tried salt, beer, you name it...'
Teacher 2- 'Hot water does the trick for me.'
French lady-' You can fry zem in a leetle butter wiz garlic and serve zem wiz a green salad.........' (Looks round at stunned, jaw-dropped colleagues in consternation.)

I am tickled to hear that our old friend Legion's sense of humour is intact: takes a real trouper to materialise as a carpet of garden pests!
 
Saucy slugs

I once read an article about a woman who did saucy things with some garden slugs - it was very interesting but unrepeatable here, really. She got very upset when her boyfriend tried to kill them all...
Also did anyone hear a thing on the Home Truths programme on the radio where someone filled a bucket with snails and then squished them all with a thick stick? 'I can't forget the noise' the woman telling the story said...



'Stick to the road'
 
Yes I heard that Home Truths. Squashing them all in one go is a big mistake, you should do it as you find them. What would you do with all the crunchy goo left over? :cross eye
 
Snails are pragmatic.
When one of their mates gets squashed, his mates eat him.

Imagine if that happened in the sales rush at Harrods..........
 
When I was an au-pair in Paris a long time ago, I rescued a snail from certain death. I was at a party and opened the fridge to get another beer, when I saw a large snail in a bowl and it was still alive. I went mental and said I'd save it, took it out and put it into an empty fag packet.
When back in my room, I made him/her a little terrarium from an old big glass bowl. Fed it lettuce and stuff. I called it Anatol. After a week it had escaped and I couldn't find it.
Six month later, when I was going back home, I found it wedged betweed the wings of a little gargoyle statue. It had glued itself on there butwhen I took it off, it was still alive. Very thin but alive.
So I put it into an old coffe jar and it joined me on a 14 hour trip on a train to Germany.
Back home, I was so tired that I just put it onto my shelf.
My dad did a bout of tidying up and when I came into my room, the coffe jar was gone. He had chucked it. Aaaaarrrrgh. I told him that my snail was in there. Now my dad loved animals and after hours of contemplating, he went downstairs outside where the communal bin was [in his pyjamas, and it was a night in December!] and went through the rubbish and got it back.
Then Anatol had a good life, large terrarium, with little branches etc.
I picked him/her a friend from the forest. Tehy got on well together. After a while the other snail [snail 2] laid eggs, which I put into a nursery and theyall hatched. I then let snail2 and its kids back into the wild.
Anatol showed a bit of white hard stuff in his side, which I pulled out because I thought he/she had hurt him/herself. That was silly as it was a "love-arrow, its what snails shoot into each other when kissing :oops:
Needless to say after another two weeks I found Anatol with his/her head hanging in its little pond, it was dead...
The only conclusion I could come up with was that he/she had topped her/himself after all its been through.
Sniff.
Mind you I had it for 2 years!
 
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