Slugs and Snails

It is widely known that slugs and snails are deterred by copper. We have noticed that plants cultivated with our tools are less susceptible to slug and snail damage, and many users of the tools have also reported this.

The water snails and the bucket

We received this email from a longstanding user of the tools. It adds another dimension to our slugs/snails/copper investigations.

From:       Flannagan, Davie 

Sent:        29 September 2006 17:24

To:          'david.flannaganatgmail.com'

Subject:   Snails eating your veggies...not anymore!

Hi Jane

We have an indoor fish tank at home and as part of the natural "tank cleaning team" I have four water snails, who keep the tank clear by eating the algae on the inside. In the past 30 hours all four snails have died and all other inhabitants of the tank are well. My snails died due to copper poisoning …..thusly :

I use many of your copper tools in our garden, in fact those are the only tools we use. The other day I noticed that the head of my copper hoe was loose, so I stood it in a bucket of water to let the wooden shaft expand. I then forgot about it and removed it about five days later and I threw the water  away.

Some days  later I used the same bucket to change some of the water in my fish tank, which is part of its routine maintenance. The residual copper that had been adhering to the inside of the bucket was enough to kill my snails in a week. When you think of how little copper must have been in that bucket and hence in the solution…methinks maybe its action was potentised by my accidentally making a homeopathic solution.

Anyhow, come next Spring …guess what I am going to spray over my veggies…yup! My accidental homeopathic copper solution!  If ever proof were needed as regards this aspect of the advantages of using only copper tools in your garden, then this is it!

Regards to you Jane and to all at "Implementations" For those recipients of this e mail who don't know about these wonderful tools…look at the web site www.implementations.co.uk

Regards

Davie Flannagan

Why does copper make a difference? We think it is all to do with electricity and magnetism. Here is our suggested explanation.

We live in the Earth's magnetic field, which is sustained by the relatively high iron content in the Earth's core. Any piece of iron can have its own magnetic field. The metal copper, on the other hand, is non-magnetic and highly conductive.

We, and all other mammals, have iron in our blood. That is why our blood is red. It enables each of us to have our own independent magnetic field, anchored on our blood. Slugs and snails do not have iron in their blood. Their blood contains haemocyanin, based on copper. This means that they do not have an independent magnetic field. As copper is conductive, they are highly sensitive to the Earth's field. As they move along the ground, they are subject to the lines of magnetic force generated by the rotating core of the Earth.

Now, imagine that a diligent gardener has carefully transplanted their lettuce seedlings, using an iron tool. As the tool turned the soil, it left its magnetic signature. When night falls, the slugs and snails start on their slimy way, following the lines of force that they detect on the soil surface. When they reach this disturbance around the transplanted lettuces, they are forced to stop. They do not know where to go - the signal is not  clear. They have to wait, and while they wait, they get hungry. And there go the lettuces.

When we first realised what was going on with the slugs and snails in our garden, we were so amazed that we wrote an article about it. 

How I learned to value slugs and snails

Slugs and snails must be among the most visible, and certainly the most infuriating of pests for the organic gardener. The demoralisation of seeing the tell-tale slimy trail, and the remains of a lettuce or runner bean crop, is a common experience. 

I love the idea of growing my own food, but until two years ago it never exactly came to reality. And the reason for the failure was largely because of the slimy little blighters. I gave up even trying with supposedly simple crops like spinach or lettuce. I unwillingly shared my potato crop with the garden molluscs. My tomatoes and runner beans had major fortifications around them (moats, stilts, copper tripwires, sawn-off plastic bottles and bits of plastic drainpipe as collars around the plants) until they were robust enough to survive unassisted. It was a continual battle. I squashed the tiny slugs or snails I found around the plants I wanted to keep, and threw the larger ones in the compost bin, on the basis that they might chomp something usefully there.  

However, I had a nagging suspicion that the remedies I was using were dealing with symptoms and not causes. What is it that prompts slugs and snails to do so much damage? Last year I inadvertently stumbled on a possible explanation.  

For reasons unconnected with molluscs, I started using copper garden tools in the garden in spring 2001. By August I noticed that the potato crop on a small raised bed was doing well, and put it down to the quality of the manure and the fact that I had earthed them up with grass clippings. There were so many potatoes that they were pushing through the surface, so I started picking them off, trying to avoid disturbing the roots. Then, ever optimistic, I sowed some lettuce seeds in the greenhouse. 

A week later they had started to sprout, and late one night I did a prowl with the torch. I found two large slugs in the area, picked them up and deposited them in the compost bin. Ten days later the lettuces were still there, such a surprising event that I didn’t know what to make of it. In the absence of any other course of action, I promptly forgot about it. At the end of August I harvested my potatoes, and by this point I realised that something decidedly strange was going on. Even having had several meals from the potatoes I had already picked, there were still 36 pounds of potatoes on that raised bed. And of the entire crop, only six potatoes had slug damage.   

The miracle continued in 2002. May was warmer and wetter than average in the UK, and not surprisingly, high levels of slugs and snails were reported by many gardeners. In my garden, admittedly, most of the Cosmos disappeared from the flower garden, but I had a bumper spinach crop in the spring. The runner beans survived (minus four) without fortifications at all. I saw slime trails in the greenhouse, but the tomatoes were completely untouched by molluscs. In June 2002, I passed a personal milestone. I do not throw the snails out of the greenhouse any more.  

What is going on? A possible clue lies in the fact that molluscs’ blood contains haemocyanin, based on copper, whereas human blood is based on iron, haemoglobin. I wondered, what effect does this have on a slug’s behaviour?   

It is thanks to the existence of haemoglobin in our blood that humans are able to think at all. The circulation of the iron in our blood around the body is the anchor of an independent electromagnetic field. Iron can be magnetised, so one piece of iron can hold a different field from another. This property of the iron in our blood allows us to think different thoughts and feel different feelings from the person standing next to us. Even though we live within the Earth’s magnetic field, we have the ability to maintain our own independent field within it.   

It would be a very different scenario if our blood were based on haemocyanin. Copper is non-magnetic and highly conductive, so we would have no independent field. Instead, we would be intensely aware of external electromagnetic variations. We would be sensitive to differences in the Earth’s magnetic field in a way that is beyond our imagining, and we would be compelled to respond. We would not be capable of any independent action at all.  

Maybe this is what governs the behaviour of slugs and snails. They aren’t attracted by my newly-transplanted lettuce seedlings, but are compelled to respond to the disturbance that has gone on in the soil there. The disturbance may be the residual magnetism from a rusty nail, or the magnetic signature from the iron tool which turned the soil. This is what attracts them. When they arrive in the area, they need some sustenance, so they eat my seedlings. If I throw these slugs in the compost bin, the disturbance still exists in the lettuce patch, so they or other slugs and snails will still be attracted to it.   

But working the soil with copper tools has the opposite effect. As copper is conductive, it leaves no magnetic residue, but rather it connects up any breaks in the magnetic field. So there is less to attract the slugs and snails. They wander over the area, but don’t stop for long, and so don’t need to eat anything.  

This may give a hint to the role of the garden molluscs. If my thinking is correct, then the slugs and snails play a valuable part in the ecology of the garden. They represent the highly conductive metal, copper, roaming around the garden, rather like those robot lawnmowers that are supposed to keep the lawn trimmed. They help the land to link up with itself, by smoothing out any disruptions in the flow of the geomagnetic field. The slime trail is their visiting card. So in my garden, I now leave them to do their job.  

I am not academically trained in any of the areas touched by these speculations, and would appreciate any comments or feedback from those who are. I can’t explain the survival value of this behaviour to the slugs and snails, for example. It is also undeniable that they do seem to target certain plants, which is another area worth investigating. They must be responding to extremely small variations in the geomagnetic field, but that also seems plausible. After all, Homeopathy also works with scientifically insignificant quantities. In the meantime, I am delighted that the slugs and snails do not devastate my garden any more.  

The inspiration for the copper garden tools project came from the work of the Austrian forester, inventor and visionary, Viktor Schauberger. He viewed the Earth as a living entity, female, maternal, with water as her blood. Vegetative growth is the result of the marriage of the incoming, vertical, positively charged, solar energy and the horizontal, negatively charged, earth energy. Copper, as a diamagnetic element, plays a decisive role in that transformation and growth. He believed it would assist the flow of groundwater to the plants and improve the health of the soil, thereby reducing the incidence of pests and increasing crop yields.   

Many of Viktor Schauberger’s ideas, including those about the effectiveness of copper tools, have been independently tested and verified. It was after reading about his work that I decided that I wanted to use copper tools in my own garden. I do not regret that decision.   

A version of this article appeared in issue 23 of Living Lightly, the magazine section of Positive News, with the title 'Learning to Love Slugs and Snails'.             

 Website: www.positivenews.org.uk