Gosh, you poor thing Angelee

Is it moist and shady in your garden ?

Reminds me of a time when my son and his friend spent hours collecting snails in my garden. Later on that day I discovered to my horror, they had put the snail container in the freezer !! All the snails where dead. It still haunts me, but makes me chuckle as well.

Dont like snail baits, the poor blue tongues die if they ingest them.

You say fence, maybe they are coming from next door. What is going on over that fence.

You could think laterally, and go into snail farming.

Sorry I cant offer more solutions, but they must like your place for some reason.

All the best with your slimey predicament.

Popi

Yes our garden is very moist and shady!! Who'd have thunk that could be a bad thing!

I guess they like us because we have (well had until they ate them all!) lots of lovely soft seedlings to chew on as we are in the process of rebuilding the very neglected garden.

I picked them off the fence yesterday, but they are also climbing the walls of the house so they are certainly not picky about the garden they choose to feast on within our place!

i guess I'll just have to bribe my 3 1/2 year old to go on a squishing, squashing, splishing sploshing seek and destroy mission tomorrow lol :)

Angelee

I remember that I paid my kids 50c for a bucket (kids size) of snails. I usually put a spoonfull of salt at the bottom to prevent them from escaping. I have a plague this year too, I think it is the wet spring that we have had so far. Unfortunately my kids have grown up and there is nobody but me to collect the snails. My suggestion would be ask your neighbour if you can put snail pellets over the fence, perhaps he/she doesn't mind? At least you would get rid of those on the other side? Apart from that you can put containers with beer half burried in the ground, it is supposed to attract snails, they get drunk and drown, however I am a scrooge, I prefer to drink it instead if giving beer to the snails.

I think Megg's beer sugestion is the best. I used to have heaps here, I think they may be another thing the Bandicoots eat as we haven't very many now.

my garden was the same so I started keeping a bucket of water with a good handful of salt in it on the patio and got really serious about collecting them. when the bucket gets full empty it and start again. on a 800sqm block it wont take long to get them under control. what you need to do though is start checking around for where they are hiding, the fence is probably a nice shady cool area so they rest there when its dry, they do the same thing underneath plants, on walls and around pots as well so if you start picking them up as you see them, and start checking the other places youll get through them, but just dont try to do it all at once. when its wet youll seem them on the move but when it's dry, its all these shady cool places that they go to hide and hang out.

Gardenlen has some good suggestions on his site, especially using coffee to kill snails. Apparently caffiene is highly toxic to snails but obviously not us though I suppose it really depends how much coffee you drink :)

Take heart Angelee, I think you'll find in a month or so the worst will be over and you'll suddenly realise things aren't being eaten quite so much. In the meantime, keep doing what you're doing, i.e. collecting them in a bucket, you're probably saving several plants a night.
By the way, I've tried using those pellets which are supposed to be safe for birds and animals, but I've also found they're safe for snails!

Just an idea - when you plant your seedlings, encircle them with a barrier of coarse sand. It cuts and irritates them. I have had a problem with them too and this does help. They also do not like to crawl over finely chopped pea straw. They tend to get stuck and are easily collected in the trusty bucket.

I just posted a response to RE: do snail pellets kill grogs???. Check that out for a snail "treatment".
Collecting them is the a good thing though. It's the moisture and shelter they love. Do you have lots of planks and stuff lying around that they might be hiding under?
The only useful thing rats do is eat snails.

Gerry the gardener on ABC's gardening programme suggested using one part of ESPRESSO coffee to ten parts of water. I clarified that the coffee had to be 'made' first and he also said it had to be espresso, other coffee didn't work. Just spray it on the ground and on the plants. They are supposed to be killed by the caffiene. I have tried it on my clivia and so far no flowers have been eaten. Trouble is it must be done again after rain. Hope this helps. Trouble is you need a lot of coffee to kill a plague.

Thanks for all those suggestions, I love the coffee one, we have a coffee machine so we will try that!

I gave in in the end after getting disheartened that my bucket efforts were in vain and I layed some snail pellets down, very sparingly.

They did wonders, literally hundreds of snails keeled over mid slither to all our young frangipanis and seedlings! Although there was a nasty nasty side effect... hundreds of rotting snails meant of course THOUSANDS of disgusting flies!!! The worst is over now though. For a few days there we were holding breath and noses to keep from breathing them in and swallowing them on the way to the car. And of course the house had to be locked up and all windows and doors surface spray treated to stop them flooding into the house!

I'll give the coffee thing a go though and hopefully from now on they'll be a much smaller issue :)

Ange