There's this seedling Dahlia plant in a planter we have been trying to grow, but the snails keep getting at it so looks like we're trying to grow a pot of plant stubble.

Members of the household keep saying that they hate those damn snails. I don't share that sentiment.

I don't mind them because if they kill the plant, that's one less plant I'm asked to water please if I just happen to go outside. -Am I the only one who knows how to work a damn garden hose?

Anyway, even more annoying than watering the plant is having to listen to them whine about the snails eating it. Why don't they just use some damn snail bait like suggested time and time again you ask? Because they don't want to use poison. Sheesh.

Can't really use a can of beer submerged in the ground because the potter is sitting on a brick paved area.

I suggested just putting the beer can inside the pot, but no, that's ugly they say.

*sigh*

So now I hate the damn slugs too, not because I hate them, but because I hate hearing about them. I really hate hearing about them.

So a few days ago I got fed up with having to hear about them. It meant only one thing:

SNAIL WARZ!

I had to come up with an eco-friendly way to massacre the snails.

I said I would take care of it, but that people would just have to stfu about my methods. How was I going to do it? Never-you-mind I said. It would not involve poison. It would involve a method I had suggested weeks ago. Now stfu.

Snails have a watery membrane they slide on. If you remember from Jr. High science that if there is a semi-permeable membrane with a concentration of solution which was greater on one side than the other, through Osmosis you would get a net transfer of water to equal the concentration on both sides of the membrane.

For a snail it means that if it encounters salt, the water oozes out of its body because there's more of a concentration of salt on the outside of the cell walls than on the inside.

If you've ever salted a slug or a snail as a kid, that's what I did, only, I wasn't going to murder them wholesale - I wasn't going to hunt them. Besides, they only came out at night. No, I just wanted them to stop eating the damn plant so I could surf for porn in peace.

My solution was to salt the rim of the pot, and inadvertently salted the surrounding area around the pot, so I just added a little more. The end result was a large salted perimeter around the pot.

The next morning I found these guys here:



You can see they showed up for their nightly feast and encountered the salt, so they zigged, and zagged, and eventually just stopped in their tracks because they kept hitting my salt granular land mines.

There, that'll fix you fuckers.

It didn't kill them because they tried to get out of the mine field the next night, zigged and zagged, then stopped as you can see here:



So, problem solved. I just have to remember to salt it again whenever it rains. And the salt I used is like Trader Joe's Sea Salt, which is all we have in the house.

I'll update this to show you what happens to these guys when they try to move - and no, I'm not helping them move. I want them to be a warning to any other snails who dare to venture in too close. If it rains, they'll be able to split, but until then, they can zig and zag to their deaths.

I didn't ask for this war. I'm not the one who drew First Blood.

Die fuckers, die.