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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

Strawberries have to be my most successful allotment crop: https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4735353542/in/datepo...

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They look succulent. Do you use slug pellets?

The last time I tried growing them was when I was a child. The built up excitement of fruiting ended in anticlimax as I found them all eaten one morning, before I had been able to pick them. My mother said slugs got them.

Now I wonder about that comment.

No problems with the strawberries but pretty much everything else gets attacked by them.

I think the strawberries aren't affected so much because they aren't a target for long, we pick them every other day through the season.

If they were all gone overnight I guess something else took them e.g. birds.

If snails took them you'd see strawberry "skins" still hanging there.

Edit: tip for removing snails without using questionable chemicals: pour beer into something that is easy for snails to enter. Leave out in the strawberry crop overnight. At least around here snails love beer and drink themselves to death.

If they were all gone it's not likely birds either. Birds can't "see" the red pigmentation in strawberries.

Which birds are you talking about? Birds have excellent color vision.

Yeah I'm sorry I don't know where I got that idea!!!

That said, I grow a lot of these berries and for some reason the birds never go near em.

It was definitely the mother the entire time.

There is some evidence that snails and slugs respond to culling with increased breeding, instead i run a snail heaven,I plant sacrificial crops in front of my prime concern and if I find any wanderers I put them there, works a treat, remember slugs and snails are essential to release some of the needed chemicals from rotting vegetation,they are not the enemy!

Do you have a picture of that? That sounds cool. What do you plant there that's more delicious than strawberries ?

salad leaves, not much going on at the moment missed the boat this year and settled mostly for sunflowers, got a few pots but no visits from snails or the 'snails without houses' as my Austrian friend calls them :)

Depending on where you grew up, a more likely culprit is deer. I can't grow much of any berries/flowers/some bushes because as soon as they look like they are doing great, one night all of the blooms/berries/leaves are mysteriously stripped off.

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