[pedalling_faster]

i joined a community garden.

we are having a debate about - Snails !

about half the members smash the snails.

some of the members throw the snails into an area under some apple trees.

the soil is incredibly fertile. a testament to the hard work of the earthworms & snails that are eating & creating fertilizer & castings.

as a new member, i don't want to lock horns with the snail-smashing members.

so i asked a few people to save snails for me. i brought the snails home, and didn't have anywhere to put them.

so i put them in a coffee pot.



then i realized that i had run out of filters for my other coffee pot, and since i had a whole bunch of filters for the coffee pot shown, i moved the snails to a gallon plastic juice jug.

then i made the mistake of putting honeydew melon rinds and pineapple rinds in the snail's home, thinking that i was doing something wonderfully organic.

a day or 2 later, and all the snails were on life support. unconscious, not moving.

though i don't care too much about this particular batch of snails, i decided i should treat it as an emergency.

so i filled up a can with spring water, and rinsed all the snails off.

during the next few hours, about 3/4 of them revived.

they are now in a new home, a 5 gallon bucket with a plastic netting (from a bag of tangerines)/ duct tape cover.



not exactly in the same family of industrial design as the iPod, but it'll have to do.

in the meantime, i'm working on a bigger cage for them, full of Swiss Chard. apparently, that is what they like to eat.

i'm hopeful that their castings will help turbo-charge my food crops. i'm concentrating on stuff i like to eat (tomatoes, corn) and sugar crops (honedew melon, cantaloupe, watermelon).

i don't really expect the garden to produce much. i'm approaching it more as an educational experience.

our next project is, what to do about the homeless guy that is sleeping in the greenhouse.

personally, i think we ought to give him some food. but, there are contrasting view points.

i'm not yet sure how this city will do when TSHTF.

but, for sure, we'll have loads of Swiss Chard.

[Ludi]

If no one is using poisons you can eat the snails.


Escargot and Mushrooms

INGREDIENTS:

1/4 cup butter, softened
1 large clove garlic, crushed and minced
12 large mushroom caps
2 cans snails, about 24 snails
1 to 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1 to 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley

PREPARATION:

Combine butter and garlic. Spread half of the butter mixture in the bottom of a shallow baking dish. Place mushroom caps in pan, dotting each equally with remaining butter and garlic mixture. Fill each mushroom cap with 2 snails; sprinkle with a little Parmesan cheese and the parsley.

Broil 5 inches from heat for 5 minutes, or until snails and mushrooms are heated through.

Snails recipe serves 4.

[Ludi]

Can the homeless guy help with the gardening in exchange for a place to stay?

[pedalling_faster]

there's something about dropping the snails in boiling water that upsets me.

i can hear them scream.

i don't know if it's just my imagination, or something more like a sixth sense, like the time i aborted a skin-dive the day it was later found that there was a large adult great white feeding where i would have been diving.

in any case, i'm content to let them "crap up a storm", and to spread their little fertilizer contributions over my 3 foot by 10 foot garden plot.

2 of the rules for the garden - no industrial chemical fertilizers, and no industrial chemical pesticides.

so they're definitely non-toxic.

i guess my reluctance to eat them is related to the fact that i'm not starving to death.

thanks for the recipe.

[Ludi]

That's what I've heard too, pstarr, it cleans the dirt from their digestive system.

I never actually ate them. I don't have them where I am now (thank goodness) and when I gardened in Los Angeles I was afraid to eat them because the nighbors possibly used poison and I didn't want to risk it.

But if I knew they came from a clean garden I would try them now.

Pedalling, I don't know if there is a more humane way to kill them than to boil them alive. Possibly freeze them, though this might change the texture.

Obviously a vegetarian wouldn't eat them. If you're not a vegetarian I'm not sure why you'd be more upset about the idea of boiling snails than slaughtering beef cattle, pigs, chickens, cute lambs, etc.

[dissimulo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', 'i')'m hopeful that their castings will help turbo-charge my food crops.

[katkinkate]

How much swiss chard do you have to feed them to make enough fertiliser for 1 square metre (or yard would do)? And wouldn't it be faster to use earthworms and/or a compost bin?

[Ludi]

I'd go for the earthworm bin, myself.