Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/07/gardeners-shocking-new-trick-keeps-tomatoes-safe-from-snails.html
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we had snails getting into our potted peppers and doing major damage. got a jar of petroleum jelly and slathered the rim and outer top 1 inch all around. bastards did not come back! i guess they don’t like the jelly and won’t or can’t cross that barrier.
works for ants, too.
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I’ve seen something similar to this some years ago, someone did exactly this but for their dog’s food bowl to keep ants from invading the bowl and getting all the food. Worked really well from what i recall
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I’ve seen this, too. Not recently either, like 20 years ago.
Actually, it wasn’t a fence. It was some kind of electrified copper mesh laid out on the ground, I believe.
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Probably being overly cautious, yet even a jolly ol’ 9v battery can bridge a spark, so you might not want your happy tomato garden to be covered in burnable fuel (bark chips, leaves, dried-up previous snail corpses etc) …maybe
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And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead Shells.
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Snails never bother my tomato plants (touch wood), they murdered my peas and marrows and had a good go at my runner beans last year, but the tomatoes were unscathed.
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Useful if one wants to FARM snail
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Hmmm. I wonder if the battery could be omitted if a copper and zinc strip were used. Make the snail part of the battery.
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I read a thing a long time ago about putting a pie plate in the garden and filling it up halfway with beer. apparently they’re either attracted to the beer smell or at least they fall in when cruising your garden whereupon they get hammered and drown.
I have no idea if it works but it has worked on some snails for some people at some time, at least. oh, and I think it was slugs, but I would presume it would go for snails, too.
anyway, couldn’t hurt to try, and beer and pie plates are probably in your house now (or easily obtained for cheap) unlike copper tape.
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Vaseline for the win! I know that I mentioned this before on the BBS, but I also put Vaseline on the rod-iron pole that held my bird feeder. Squirrels couldn’t scale it and it was amusing to watch them slide downthe pole.
(I ended up removing the feeder because it attracted a massive flock of pigeons in an area that normally doesn’t have any. They’d perch on a neighbor’s roof and pooped all over it. I was worried that the neighbors would get Legionaires.)
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No need for the battery. Copper alone is effective:
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This works a treat for pill bugs. Though you need the container of beer level with the soil. We have a big issue with pill bugs in the raised garden. They eat my strawberries. So I put cleaned cans from cat food into the soil with beer. Catch a few hundred for every round. Which is enough to knock the population down to reasonable levels so I’m not loosing 90% of the berries.
Never caught a snail but the snails don’t usually try to get up the 2.5 foot stone side. When they do, the trails are easy to see. I pluck them off by hand and put them on the other side the yard.
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yep, I know this one from the 80s.
thats actually the classic method; my parents used this in our garden in the 70s. works, but bit of a mess, though.
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In my experience, don’t waste your money (although I have heard people swear by it). And don’t spend money on raw sheep’s wool – it stinks when it has been watered a few times.
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I have used it (though not the brand above), and it seems to have worked OK. You do have to make sure the slugs/snails/eggs are not already in the soil in the pot, and don’t have another way in (e.g. don’t let the pot touch a wall).
The one thing that absolutely has not worked for me is beer traps.
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I tried to find one on Amazon, but all of them has at least 30% 1 star review saying it does not work.
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