(G2)
13-03-2025
Dear second garden,
You can’t grow anything useful in my mother-in-law's nyttehave on Amager, nor in the gardens around.
I have heard of neighbors who have tried to grow squash, strawberries or potatoes, but that has been a long time ago. Every spring there are some newcomers who naively put seeds and bulbs into the ground; by summer they see all of their efforts destroyed by the snails.
The snails in my mother-in-law's nyttehaveforening are much bigger than the snails you would usually find in Denmark. Their skin is thick like leather and they lavishly carry bright yellow houses on their backs. Someone from the forening had looked them up in a biology book from the 70s and determined them to be vineyard snails, like the ones they eat in France. The big snails with their yellow houses would be pretty to look at, if only they weren’t such pests. They happen to enjoy everything we humans enjoy: fruits, vegetables, beets, roots. Snails are nocturnal animals; in the night, when we humans sleep, they feed on our hard day’s work. When I check under the leaves in the morning, there is not a single berry, not a bulb that hasn’t been gnawed on by the tireless beasts. You can imagine my frustration upon finding the massacred fruit, eaten only halfway as if to mock me, left behind like some unlovable toy.
It’s the older people of the forening who have recently turned to technology and science in trying to fight the snails. There are some who believe that snails dislike salt. This might be true for the native little snails, but the French specimen’s thick skin just lets the salt pearl off as if it were drops of water. Last summer, one neighbor had covered every square centimeter of his garden in coarse kitchen salt. This spring, not even weeds would grow in the salted earth. Another neighbor had plastered her garden with upright razorblades — the snails just glide over the cold steel like over soft grass. Another neighbor, the richest one in the forening, had read somewhere that snails would avoid ionized copper. I’m not sure what ionization is, but one summer day the rich neighbor had lined his potato beds with sheets of the precious metal — the next morning the bed was filled with yellow snail houses.
The most popular anti-snail technology of the forening is much less sophisticated than expensive metals or salt emulsions. It’s usually a setup of two stones, one bigger stone resting soundly on the earth and a smaller stone taken into hand. The dedicated gardener picks up a snail, places it onto the bigger stone and smashes it with the manually operated smaller one. My mother-in-law would call this setup her ‚killing stone‘. She is a very sweet woman, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly, but she makes an exception for snails: „It’s them or my plants“, she would always say, when the stone came down on a yellow snail house. The killing stone is not an ingenious instrument to protect the harvest from invaders. Rather, it’s a tool aimed at the future, a device for population control, one snail at a time. An uninvolved observer might think that there was rage involved, or even vengeance. I have watched my mother-in-law perform countless snail executions, and I can assure everyone that there are no feelings involved. Every performance of the killing stone is a perfectly feelingless technocratic act towards trying to achieve some kind of justice in the garden.
I frankly don’t have the heart to operate the killing stone myself. Once in a while, when I’m sure nobody is watching, I would pick up a snail and throw it as far as I could into the blue sky, so that the snails would land in one of my far away neighbor’s garden. Mostly though I just ignore the snails. I think we should consider ourselves lucky that they only seem to be interested in fruits and vegetables. We still have lawns and flowers and trees. For everything else there is always supermarkets. Someone should check on France though; I think they might have real problems with the snails down there.
Best,
Richard
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