the snail settlement - and a book review

the amount of snails in our garden this year is insane. warm days and rainy evenings made them invade and eat up what little we have grown in our garden. so when i saw the "snail settlement" project in jo schofield's and fiona danks' "the wild city book", i knew we'd give it a go since we had found so many snails and we were curious to watch them eat i.e. so we followed the instructions in the book, and here is our snail settlement:

the instructions say to place some kitchen roll over the opening and that is also what is pictured on the photo of the project page in the book. my husband pointed out to me already in the evening that a piece of kitchen roll doesn't seem like something that would hinder snails from escaping. and sure enough, this is what i arrived to the next morning, after the snails had spent a mere night in their settlement:

that makes me wonder about the last sentence on this project in the book: "after a couple of weeks or so, return the snails to where you found them." i mean, maybe we have monster snails here in northern germany who eat kitchen roll like nothing else, but i doubt that this project was actually carried out and researched completely by the authors or their assistants, after what happened with our snails in just a few hours. in case you want to build a snail settlement, i recommend using kitchen foil or a piece of plastic bag instead and piercing holes into it with a needle for ventilation. we never intended to keep the snails for several weeks, should we ever try that i would probably place them in a much larger container that can easily be re-filled with food.

apart from that, it's actually a good book. it is in no way a book that is exclusively for city kids. kids living anywhere would enjoy the activities. but there are quite a few projects are tailored to children having limited outdoor space. there are a few superfluous projects in the book (chalk pictures, water graffiti, leaf decorations, flower chains) but many inspiring ones too that i'm sure we'll try out within the next months and years!