Gardening

And a pretty cactus flower, just because:

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Gardening, don’t we love it?

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You’re growing slugs? How
 interesting! To each their own, I guess! :wink:

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YesYes! And I’m really good at it. You never know where your speciality lies.

Only one thing, made a little mistake
 These are not eatable. But love to eat. Darn


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Aren’t they just homeless snails? Wouldn’t most escargot recipes work for them?

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With some extra caution, why not? Apparently the Romans used to fatten their snails with meal and wine until they got huge and tasty, so you could try that.

Cooking slugs: Slugs, far more than snails, eat toxic mushrooms. If it is the season of toxic mushrooms the slugs should be kept for many days and fed meal or brand or lettuce to purge them. Put pre-fed slugs into a 50/50 mixture of water and vinegar. This will kill the slugs and force them to release mucus. Simmer five minutes it boiling water. Change the water and boil again for ten minutes. Change the water a third time and boil again for fifteen minutes (so you have three changes of water and a total of 30 minutes boiling time.) If the slug has a foul tasting digestive organ remove and rinse. The cooked slug is now ready to eat or use in other dishes.

Another way to cook snails is to put them upside down next to your fire and leave them there until they bubble vigorously.

Slug Fritters

Ingredients:

10 cooked and cleaned large slugs

1/2 cup of cornmeal

1/2 cup of flour

3 eggs

1/4 cup of heavy cream

4 tbs. butter

4tsp. sour cream

Method:

First chop the slugs into fine mince, then beat the eggs with the heavy cream together. Sift the dry ingredients and then cut two tablespoons of butter into that mixture. Add the egg and cream mixture to the dry ingredients and whip with a whisk vigorously for one to two minutes. Melt one tablespoon of butter in a sauté pan and pure the batter into 2 1/2 inch cakes in two batches. Serve warm with a dollop of sour cream. Yields four servings.

Slugs that are still in palatable after boiling can be fried until crisp and tried, or ground into a flour and added to other meals for nutrition.

According to the Journal of Experimental Biology, August 2006, slugs are 5.1% carbohydrates, 0.5% fat, 7.1% protein and 85% moisture. When cooked they are probably lower in carbs because that is contained in the mucus which is lost in cooking. Slugs were on the diet of many Native Americans in the northwest US, where they have some 27 different kinds. German immigrants to that area gutted them and fried them in batter.

ETA: Here’s a demonstration of cooking slugs. Apparently they taste “almost exactly like you’d expect them to”.

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one of those yeah it will keep you alive but you know there are better things to eat right now foods.

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Love your suggestion. But the internets says so, and the fact nobody eats them, makes them in my opinion un eatable.
It’s a real pity, I love snails (the eatable types, and there are a vew) And picked over the course of yesterday around thousand of the uneatable type. (No joke, I love counting).
Why, you may ask. Just for the revenge, you eat my stuff, go away! Took them far away in the woods river. I don’t have the illusion that in a good snail year picking snail have any affect. But won’t use anything else, you know. Birds, toats (have minimal 5 of them I know/seen in the garden), hedgehogs (every year a mom with little ones) etc.

But from the other side, really looked forward to the agatache, sunflowers, beets, to name a vew, and no fun when it all gets into food. (The ‘all’ is a clue to my whining).

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We bought this book for a friend with similar problems:

We used to share an allotment with a Dutch couple; the guy would put them on the path and squelch them with his clogs (klompen). We would usually just make traps with beer.

ETA: Of course there are lots of countries with traditional wooden shoes, but some of them are really interesting:

Cantabrian albarcas:


German/Danish/Swedish TrĂ€skor (like Birkenstock, I hadn’t thought of them as clogs before though)

English clogs from Lancashire:

Indian Paduka:

Takunya (bathing shoes) from Turkey:

Namaskin from Korea:

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Ducks! You need some ducks in there quickly! Ducks!

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@Stynx being out in the sticks in France can probably get ducks. I can’t have ducks, will chickens work? 'Cause I can get up to 4 chickens.

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It’s worth a try. My laying hens won’t eat them. On the rare occasion when I get stuck with a rooster, they will eat them, or at least peck them to pieces. The ducks, on the other hand, think they’re caviar.

From that recent picture I saw, she can keep them in her cellar! :smile:

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It was worth an ask. We’re not allowed roosters in city limits, and I wouldn’t want one anyway. Lived next door to one for a year, he made waaaay too much noise at random times.

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Yeah, I don’t normally keep them. Our chickens are for egg production, and we don’t hatch and raise our own chicks, so roosters are a waste of time. Every so often though, one will make his way past the feed store’s sexer, and they won’t take them back-- nobody wants roosters. Fortunately they can be harvested right around the time they start to get too noisy.

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“Harvested” is an interesting euphemism for “kill and eat.” :wink:

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Funny!

Seriously, however, ducks need cover. They like to be where there are grasses/rice plants (etc.) in shallow water. Geese, on the other hand, need open water. And as far as I’m concerned, @Stynx can stuff every Canada goose in existence into her cellar! Is there any creature more noisy, mean, or poopy on the planet?

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Mute Swans. Don’t let the name fool ya.

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We keep ducks in a pen under the fig trees with a kids’ wading pool for them to get wet in. Frankly, they’re a pain in the ass, always escaping and fighting with each other. They prefer to swim in the human’s pool and they poop in it if they get a chance. Even with their wings clipped, they’ll jump the fences and run off. Skunks and raccoons love them. They fight with the chickens if they can. But they’re so tasty, and their fat is sublime.

We had a goose once. She was a terror. She wouldn’t stay penned up. She was always busting out and would chase the kids and the dogs. (Which was actually kind of funny; Baskerville and Marmaduke will happily face down armed trespassers, and they will kill chickens if they attack them, but they’re afraid of a half-grown goose.) She wouldn’t lay eggs reliably. One day she attacked me, and that was enough-- she was Sunday dinner the next week. The meat was greasy and gamey and no one liked it. Waste of time.

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I was thinking about walking ducks, they are great and funny.
But I’m most of the time, 5 days a week away, (not this week \o/! I love the quet and space) so no go for living stock. Kids go to a Dutch school, so I (or and/dad) need to be there.

The cellar is OK, not dry, but no water above the stones. Hence no announcement for @japhroaig. And no place for ducks.
And I feel really sorry and guilty for complaining, in the next Northern village somebody died while inspecting his flooded cellar.

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Chickens are [from what I hear] pretty hard on plants. They will definitely go after slugs
 no problem. But your lettuces etc. will be in shreds. Chickens love greens, as you likely already know.

Ducks can be urbanized. You don’t need a big lake. Even a plastic “kiddie” pool or old bathtub, and a poultry waterer for fresh drinking water, will work. The uh ah
 used
 water ducks leave behind is excellent for fruit trees and fruit shrubs/bushes, anything where splashback isn’t going to touch something you eat (so: no watering of strawberries, lettuce, carrots, radishes etc. with duck water).

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