helen-louise's journal

My mother is nuts. She sent me a text message telling me to check the plant pots for "hungry creatures". And it was 20:14, and dark outside, so I had to take a torch to do so.

Context: my mum does not have a garden of her own and lives 10 minutes away. We do have a garden but aren't desperately interested in gardening. So she grows stuff in our garden for us. It is a compromise which would suit everyone except that she insists on growing plants which snails like to eat. Having been a gardener for decades, my mum thinks that snails are ravenous monsters who must be squashed like bugs. Richard and I are woolly hippies who object to killing things, and rather like snails.

Currently, we are checking the plant pots in the front garden (neat, pretty flowers). If a snail is found, we carry it through the house to the wild back garden, which contains a buddleia triffid (snails can eat what they want). However, there is a certain amount of hassle involved in this and I would like to prevent the snails from getting to the plants in the first place. Prevention is better than cure.

My plan is to shield the plants that we care about with copper and then have some sacrificial plants for the snails to eat. Apparently snails can't/won't cross copper, so I wanted to find out why. ( SCIENCE! )

[Bad username or site: hoopycat>, number 389 of a long series: @ livejournal.com]HoopyCat's comment about this idea: #soc.bi science fair!

Random other HoopyCat gems from today:
<HoopyCat> being-the-middleman guideline #3: when relaying messages between two people who are geeking out on a topic that's well outside your normal geeking range, put them in direct contact; it will probably result in something cool.

<astra> in our sainsbury's, next to the vegan bouillon, they have CANS of SNAILS
<HoopyCat> canned snail! they keep that next to the potted meat food product here.
<astra> and i always thought it was a special variety of snail that was eaten, but these ones look JUST LIKE the ones in our garden :(
<HoopyCat> i wish to believe that a lot of these items were originally made into canned goods while our world in the depths of the cold war
<HoopyCat> in your fallout shelter, keep canned snails and potted meat on the visible shelves... when your neighbors come over for the tour, they see your canned goods consist of utterly unappealing crap and then decide to build their own fallout shelter
<astra> i like snails
<HoopyCat> 'course, in the event of REAL emergency, you have shelves of good stuff behind a fake wall

*lol*

( And the context of the title. )