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Growing in Portugal - year one.

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BarriedaleNick:
The snails here go into aestivation for months when it is hot and dry - they seal themselves in and wait it out.  Oddly they choose high places to do this like trees and fence posts, rather than hiding under rocks etc.  The biggest predator is people, they are sold here as caracois and they are a sort of bar snack really, not a lot to them but if you go to the beach bar you can get a huge plate of them for a few euros...
I guess the birds leave them alone but most birds here are either small tits and sparrows or massive great Storks!

Beersmith:
Thanks.  Interesting stuff.

pumkinlover:
How bizzare that the snails find the hottest and most open place. That said they do climb up windows and other surfaces here, though not in quite as many numbers. Odd that they are not predated on other than the local publicans.

Obelixx:
Gardeners here tend to have munching machines to break up stems and small branches to make a woody mulch they put on their borders.  Much finer than chipped bark.  The council beds have the same and it seems to work well judging by how good the municipal plantings look on roundabouts and so on.   

We don't have enough of that so I use chipped bark on the permanent beds and in the veg plot I hide a seep hose under it in the soft fruit bed and trust to the foliage of the squashes and dahlias to keep the sun off the seep hose in their bed.   Tomatoes and chillies in the polytunnel also have a seep hose.

We grow all our brassicas under nets to keep off both chooks and butterflies and that acts as a bit of a sunscreen too so less baking.

A friend of mine whose garden is next to the Marais Poitevin which comes all the way up to the coast here has those snails too.  The ones we get here are the more usual ones seen in restaurants.  I feed them to the chooks or lob them across the road into the hedgerow or else just crush them.

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