Love Thine Enemies…

By Nicho

            “…those bloody snails again…!”   Sheila was incandescent. Her beautiful Sunflower seedlings she’d nurtured like her babies had been stripped of every leaf.

            “Not again…?” her husband sympathized. His wife loved their garden and had green fingers. Everything she planted came up beautifully, at the right time in the correct position but this battle with the slugs and snails was an ongoing war. “I’ve told you – slug pellets are the only way. All this ‘coffee grounds and crushed eggshell’ nonsense does not work – I think you’ve tried everything, haven’t you?”

            Sheila looked sad and nodded her head. “Pretty much.” She agreed. “but I don’t want to use poison – my garden is all organic – nothing in the way of chemicals in it and anything you kill with poison, poisons another little critter who you might not want to kill.  I mean look at Mrs. Andrews and her rat poison – she killed three owls with that stuff!  No, poison is too indiscriminate.”
             Sheila sat down in her armchair, and took the proffered cup of tea from her husband, Norman.  “So, what are you going to do? You can’t keep just feeding the little blighters, can you?” he asked.

 Sheila nodded absently.  Then she looked up and smiled.”I’ve got an idea!”

Norman looked worried – he was used to his wife’s ideas….. “Hmmm…?” he swallowed his tea, non-committaly

            “We’ll do a nightly snail- hunt!  Okay – we won’t get them all but we should make a dent in the numbers at least…?”  She looked askance at her hubby.

            Norman drew out his “yes” so it sounded more like an elongated  ‘yearse’ “and when you’ve got them, in your little bucket, I presume, what then? What do you do with them – bin them?”
            “No – they’d just climb back out. I suppose we could keep them until the  green bin was collected?”

            Norman looked unsure “ and just have them squished in the chopping machine the green stuff goes through…?”

            Sheila looked horrified, “What chopper?”she said, open mouthed.

            “Well what do you THINK happens to your garden waste? They chop it up and make mulch and compost out of it.” Norman spread his hands in the universal gesture for ‘what?’.
            

            “Ooohh… I didn’t know that. “  Rethink needed….”

Two cups of tea and a plate of chocolate HobNobs later, she had the answer. Chocolate is ALWAYS the answer!

            “That field at the back of us – it’s just grazing for those lovely horses, isn’t it?”
             “ Yerse…” her husband intoned.

                "Well, what about if, as we pick them off the plants – we sling them as far as we can into the field!  That way no-one gets hurt and the snails have a new home!” Sheila smiled with triumph.
 Norman raised his eyebrows. “Well, he said,” at least they’ll be a while finding their way back!”
            “We’ll start tomorrow night!” Sheila beamed. With this plan in mind, they switched off their day and went to bed.

 The next day, Sheila found more casualties in her greenhouse.  “My lobelias!” she cried, inspecting one poor specimen with only one stalk left and the other six not much better.   “That’s it ! This is WAR!”

Sheila spent the rest of the day emptying her greenhouse, hosing it down and scrubbing everything scrubbable and then sprayed the whole structure with Jeyes fluid. 
           

            “There were dozens of the little buggers Norman!” slinging her slug and snail filled bucket in front of him and between him and his newspaper. “LOOK!”

            “Hmmmm!” mumbled Norman, rather more interested in the test-match scores in his paper.
            “I’ll sling them over right now!  ”and she retreated to the garden, much to Norman’s great relief.

The job done, Sheila put her greenhouse back to rights and got on with the rest of her day.

That evening out into her garden she went, torch in hand.  She had been hoping for a bit of help from Norman but he was less than enthusiastic about the idea of actually touching slugs and snails – even wearing gloves – so she just left him to his TV and went out herself.

She found so many slugs and snails….! Her arm was almost sore from slinging the little creeps over the fence, but she decided she’d found most of them and headed toward her kitchen.

On the way back to the house, Sheila picked some cucumber, tomatoes and lettuce from her salad bed by the kitchen door and took them in and popped them into the washbowl in the sink to wash, ready for the fridge.

She locked up the back door and put on the alarm and turned to the sink to wash the salad stuff. The tomatoes were beautiful – Sheila couldn’t resist popping one into her mouth – delicious! She dried them and put them into their bowl then the magnificent cucumber! She didn’t think she’d ever grown a better one!  The lettuce looked great too – nice and firm…… Eeek!  What was that!  A snail on her lettuce! She looked closer. It was only a tiny one -  just a baby really….  He couldn’t have done much harm to it…
Well, she wasn’t unlocking and de-alarming just to chuck out one little snail – she’d see to him – and any others tomorrow.
She had a plastic punnet some strawberries had come in so she put the outer lettuce leaves, which she always discarded anyway, into the punnet along with the ‘top and tail’ of the cucumber and one squashed tomato and delivered the snail into his hotel for the night, placing a place-mat on top to stop him escaping – not that he would with all that food in there!
Having ridded herself of her unwelcome guest, she joined Norman in the tv room to finish off their evening.

            Next morning, Norman went off to work and Sheila got on with her day. She had lots to do today –the washing had piled up over the week-end and she had shopping to do and also her Mum was unwell so she would need to go check on her, and to see if she needed anything.

            By the time she came home it was gone one o’clock and she was starving, so she made herself a lovely chicken salad with her favourite dressing and a custard tart for afters – mmm!
             After she’d eaten, he went to her cupboard where she kept their kitchen bins to scrape the leftover salad into the compost bin and her eye caught the little box in which she’d incarcerated the little snail the evening before.

            “Oh! “ she exclaimed, “I’d totally forgotten about you!” and lifted the box out, meaning to take into the garden for the ‘fence-flinging’ ceremony.

She removed the placemat from the top to leave it behind on the drainer and as she did so she came eye to antennae with the tiny snail. He had been busy munching on a bit of cucumber, sitting on the top of all the cast away lettuce

He stopped munching and just, it seemed, looked at her.  Was it her imagination, or was he smiling? .    She looked a little closer and he was quite cute, really – not ugly like she had imagined.  His shell was in pretty stripes of shades of amber, sepia and parchment and his little body was a shade of pale grey-green – almost transparent in parts. 
            At this moment – Sheila was confused. She’d never REALLY looked at a snail before – she just assumed they were slimy ugly nasty creatures but this little chap was none of those things. He was just a little animal, minding his own business, carrying his home around with him – no different than her pet tortoise really.

            Sheila was now very conflicted…  She couldn’t bring herself to project this little soul up into the air, to land who knew where – not after he looked at her with what appeared to be gratitude and innocence.

            The placemat was replaced whist she foraged in the cupboard under the stairs and, eventually, she emerged carrying what appeared to be a fish tank.

            Ten minutes later, Brian, as she had been calling him in her head, was in his new home with fresh veggies and a couple of small twiggy branches from the garden - and the remains of her last two sunflowers……

Brian was going nowhere anytime soon….