Rain, ducks and a back-up plan to deal with snails

 

Looking at the weather forecast, tomorrow looks like a good day for tilling-and-planting. The soil should be dry enough to till and you cannot beat natural rain for getting seeds (both garden and weed seeds, unfortunately) off to a grand start.

My goal for tomorrow is to get the nursery emptied out and the plants in dirt, in garden rows.

Duck update

They ate very little of the feed I put out yesterday. That probably means they were gorging on slugs, snails, earthworms and centipedes that had been hunkered-down in the dirt waiting for the dry-spell to end.

This Plague of Snails has me re-thinking my cover-crop strategy. My guess is that snails and slugs thrive in the cool-damp of spring and fall and my cover-crops are super-charging their populations.

I normally plant cool-season, edible plants for my fall/winter/spring cover-crop. Sometimes I plant turnips. Sometimes rye grain. Sometimes oats. Some of my thinking is "Well, if things truly go into the septic-tank, then I still have something edible growing in the garden, even in the off-season."

The obvious answer would be to skip cover-crops for a couple of years and see if the problem self-corrects. However, cover-crops also scavenge nutrients that would otherwise be leached out by the rains and snow-melt...and they add organic matter to the soil when tilled into it.

Another possibility is to plant edible plants that have leaves that are high in oxalates. Some biologists hypothesize that retaining toxic, partially metabolized molecules like oxalic acid provide some level of protection against browsing. Those toxic compounds might impair plant growth but the protection they provide more than compensates for the penalty.

Rumex fueginus growing in a fen

It is reasonable to speculate that oxalates (insoluble salts of oxalic acid and metal ions like calcium or iron) deters snails since "dock" or "sorrel" (Rumex) are one of the few, common, broad-leafed plants in sedge-marshes.

I have no proof that this would work but calcium oxalate is highly irritating due to its sharp crystals and free oxalic acid (the "sour" in sorrel) will out-compete the carbonate ion for calcium ions, thus depriving the snail of the material it needs to grow its shell. 

In addition to Rumex, edible plants that have leaves with relatively high oxalate content include Buckwheat, Swiss Chard, Beets and Spinach. Only the last three plants tolerate frost. Oxalate content in greens can be reduced by boiling in water and then discarding the water. Oxalate can contribute to kidney stones and that is something most people would prefer to avoid.

So far, the ducks are doing a great job on the snails but I am a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy. One neighbor dog getting into the garden enclosure could kill them all in less than five minutes.