Snail Mish Mash

I didn't much like being a kid.

One couldn't do lotsa things being a kid. One couldn't blow bubbles through the straw into the Orange Fanta. One couldn't take spoons of gravy from each dish served, mix it together and add Coke... hoping to see an explosion. And one certainly couldn't use drinking straws to blow streams of 7-Up at one's brother.

But well... all that is behind me now. Petunia can get up to all sorts of disgusting mish-mash now that she's a bona fide adult, and a mother to boot. (And in case you're wondering, I don't allow my kids to do any of the above. I never said they were acceptable behaviours. I just said I enjoyed doing them.)

And I still do. Garden snails come from nowhere to eat up my seedlings. These slimy creatures are the nemesis of every underaged plant. Instead of tearing out my hair in frustration, I decided to make Snail Mish Mash Fertiliser. I'm not sure but I would imagine that Snail Mish Mash Fertiliser would be very good for my plants. After all, if the snail eats plants, then the nutrients from snails would have come from plants... and therefore in returning the snails to the soil, the nutrients would go back into the plants? No? Yes?

Anyhow, Torchbearing Petunia braved the darkness of the past few wet nights and collected these voracious critters from every pot just as they had stretched their muscles and were going to have their first meal of the night. Their breakfast, so to speak. I got 'em at their breakfast!

At present, they are being pickled in a dish of rice vinegar. I shall wait 2 weeks before I mash them up, and throw them back into the soil so that the calcium from their shells will feed my plants.

They actually look quite yummy to me, and I am thinking "escargots au beurre vert" that my foster mother used to make in spring. The problem is that my snails aren't quite big enough... and I don't have quite as many to make a decent meal of them.