Snail composting?

[Phil]

Has anyone tried snail  composting?  I read about it in Bob Flowerdew's book The No Work Garden.  You keep the snails in an old laundry basket with a moat around it to stop the babies from escaping, feed them scraps as you would with worms, and use their liquid manure as a liquid feed.  Can't find anything about it on the internet.

[Phil]

[Baccy Man]

The only similar thing I have heard of is farming edible snails where you get some compost as a by product but it must be sifted or sterilised to remove/kill any eggs before using it on the garden. Personally I would go for a wormery instead.

[manicscousers]

when I read this thread, I got all excited, I thought someone had worked a way out to compost snails, we would have had compost for life   ;D ;D ;D

[cornykev]

We spoke the other day about putting slugs on the compost can't we do the same with snails, not heard that one though Phil. ??? ??? ;D ;D ;D

[manicscousers]

yeah, but oour heap doesn't get hot enough, ours just think they're having a holiday in tenerife and then go back to munching our veggies  ;D

[tim]

Are they not edible snails??

[Robert_Brenchley]

The common garden snail is often eaten; it's closely related to the edible snail, but a bit smaller.

[cornykev]

So put them in foil with salt pepper and a kno b of butter and throw them on the compost in the summer. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D :-*

[Phil]

There's only a paragraph about it in Bob Flowerdew's book so I haven't much to go on.

The idea interested me for 2 main reasons:

1.  The fact that you use an old laundry basket with lots of ventilation rather than a more enclosed worm composing system, means that you could put waste cooked vegetables (e.g. the spinach that I put on the kids' plates but they refuse to eat) into it without the risk of it smelling - as it tends to in an enclosed space such as a wormery.
2.  It provides a useful activity for our mollusc friends - particularly useful for vegetarians/vegans/buddhists or anyone else who isn't keen on killing snails (unlike myself).

I expect you would need to put it out of reach of cats/rats and preferably under cover from the rain.  When autumn came and the snails were inclined to hibernate, I would just murder them in the most humane way possible and just start again in the spring. 

I agree with Baccy Man that it wouldn't be a substitute for worm composting, but I  might give it a go this spring as an experiment - in which case watch this space next summer and autumn for updates.