This is dedicated to @MaggieOHighley , writer of the Big Snail War of 2023
When my brother and I were younger, the farm we grew up on was our wonderland, adventure land and a land full of accidents and iodine. My Mom decided one spring that she wanted a garden, not the flowers or bushes planted next to the house & lining the driveway but a PROPER garden. My Dad begrudgingly gave her free reign over the side field right next to the house. He mowed it down, dug out an area for the garden and tilled it all up.
We had a huge job ahead of us. My Mom had drawn out a map of how the garden was supposed to be planted, sun flowers on one end and sweet corn on the other end. In between were all sorts of veggies & some berry bushes in the middle of the whole thing. The bushes grew fast and we had raspberries, blackberries & boysenberries galore. Along with the bees that loved them.
We worked for days planting everything, had to go in a STRAIGHT LINE! that was guided by the string she had so thoughtfully set up. Let me tell you, doing anything according to a string was very annoying to us kids. We finally got the tomatoes, peas, carrots, potatoes, lettuce and onions planted. As a reward for keeping to that horrible straight line, we got ice cream so everything was worth it.
The next few days went well, Andy & I would stare at the garden, willing those plants to pop up fully grown and ready to eat. We noticed there were quite a few visitors to the garden, rabbits were showing up, birds were pecking at the ground like crazy and the squirrels... oh dear lord, the SQUIRRELS!!! They were driving our dogs insane.
This is the when we learned that a fence needed to be put up around the garden. After we replanted several (straight) rows of seeds, my Mom & Uncles dug up a deep ditch around the garden. They started with putting fencing stakes down in the ground, set the fence in the ditch and put another stake on the other side of the fence. This was in their words "to stop the *bleep bleeping bleepers* from digging under the fence". My Dad wasn't too happy with these new words my brother and I repeated for him the second he got home from work that day.
So, the fence was erected. We even had a GATE! I was taller so had the responsibility to open the gate for my brother and I when we went in there to weed. It was glorious. This fence kept out most of the intruders and the plants started to grow. We got to haul the hose out to the side field and water the plants along with ourselves and the dogs. My Mom started putting towels outside on the porch steps so we wouldn't come in and muddy up the floors.
After a few weeks, we noticed that we had spiders and snails among the plants. The yellow garden spiders were our friends since we would feed them grasshoppers and watch them spin their webs. The snails, they were just slimy and cool to watch as they made a slime trail. We had a large fish tank inside with guppies & gold fish and snails who lived on the sides of the tank. Having a large stock tank outside with crawfish, we had successfully transferred some of those snails into that water. These snails would actually clean slime off the sides so they were cool to watch too.
When my Mom told us the sweet potatoes were growing nicely, I was horrified. Not the sweet potatoes! My Grandparents on both sides had a thing with making sweet potatoes into everything you could think of and it was just too much for me to handle any more. So I did the most obvious thing you could think of, recruited my brother into helping me sabotage those sweet potatoes. Thankfully my Mom had her straight line set for the regular potatoes a few rows over so we knew which little green plants were the sweet potatoes.
Whenever my Mom found a bug or something she didn't like (including dirt), she would use a concoction of vinegar water to destroy it. There were aphids on her flowers, spray them with vinegar... we had streaked something along the wood floors in the living room - vinegar water, a hornets nest that was right outside a bedroom window, yup you guessed it - a ladder, winter jacket & gloves (so you can't get stung too badly) and vinegar water.
My brother and I snuck into the kitchen and under the sink, got that bottle of vinegar water and went straight to those horrible sweet potatoes. We started by spraying them with the water and when that didn't work, we did the next best thing, sprayed the plants next to the sweet potatoes with vinegar water - the snails didn't like vinegar, we saw how they would abandon the plants my Mom sprayed. My brother and I painstakingly plucked about 20 snails off the plants in our garden and put them along the bottom of the sweet potatoes. Spraying the plants next to the sweet potatoes with the vinegar water. Over the next few weeks, we could see how the snails would eat those stems and leaves. Since we were the garden tenders and earned allowance for doing those chores, we never told Mom.
She never grew those sweet potatoes again, assuming the snails just had a taste for them.
Over each summer, we would grow this garden. The berry bushes got huge and we had a never ending supply there - granted you were brave enough to harvest the berries before the bees woke up for the day. We would swap out veggies year by year to allow the ground to recover - some farming reasoning we never understood. By the time we were in our teens, I was going off to college and my brother was starting middle school, the garden was a yearly adventure and we looked forward to setting it up, fixing the fence & using the gate as a swing.
To this day, I have a bottle with my own vinegar water mixture used for spraying stuff that doesn't belong - that dirt on the kitchen floor, kitty foot prints on top of my car, sneaky sprays nightly at the hornets next outside of my patio door. I will never however, spray snails, if they become a menace, I will pick them off one by one and relocate them - hopefully to someone's garden and their sweet potato plants.
