Snails

This week in class, we dove into the concept of companions on the farm. At the beginning of the week, Mr. Stewart introduced a new project to better familiarize ourselves with companions. For this project, everyone chose different companions, found on the RHS farm, to research. I wanted to choose an organism that I had actually interacted with in my lifetime, but didn't know that much about. As I looked at Me. Stewart's companion's list, my eyes immediately darted to "snail (pest)." This surprised me because I'd always thought snails were beneficial to plants, especially in an agriculture environment. I wanted to find out more about snails, so I decided to do my report on them. Through extensive research, I learned a decent amount of new information on this unique animal. I found out that snail's are damaging to an agricultural system because they munch on plant leaves, young plant bark, foliage, and fruit; this throws off an ecosystem. Snails especially like to eat fruits close to the ground like strawberries, which make them unreadable. Also, snails typically eat decomposing organic matter, which is vital to maintain soil nutrients, and therefore, plant growth. Because snails are pests, I looked into sustainable solutions to eliminating these animals from appearing in a farm setting. One of the easiest ways is to pick them off by hand and place them in a environment, like a grass field, in which they won't cause any harm. Another way is to spray a coffee mix around the plants that snails typically eat because it acts as a snail repellent. Lastly, is to create obstacles of crushed eggshells, lime, wood ash, wood shavings and sawdust around plants because snails aren't the athletic type and won't make that much of an effort to eat the plants. Overall, I learned that even though snails are slow, they can still cause a decent amount of harm to an ecosystem, and not all companions are compatible with the farm! --Makayla