A Snail of Approval

You may have noticed a few hitchhikers on your leafy greens recently. If you’re a long-term veg box customer, or if you grow your own veg, you’ll know that snails and slugs are more common and harder to control when the weather is warm and wet.

I’m not going to lie. The first time I saw a slug on my Green Connect lettuce, I was pretty ‘yuck’ed-out. But then I spoke with a few other veg box customers who told me that they don’t mind finding a snail or two in their box. At first, I couldn’t understand it. But then I started to connect the dots and my perspective has slowly changed…

There are so many challenges that we face when growing food, including pests, weeds, and nutrient deficiencies. These are magnified greatly when growing food at scale. Modern farming uses synthetic chemicals in an attempt to eliminate these challenges completely. But in the long-term, we know this doesn’t work and we know that it causes severe damage to our planet.

At the Green Connect farm, we follow permaculture principles to grow food in a way that enriches and regenerates the land. We embrace diversity, we mimic natural systems, and we don’t use synthetic chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.

The nature strips and diversity in our landscape make ideal breeding grounds for slugs and snails and managing them is one of our biggest challenges. We reduce their populations as much as we can using creative whole-systems solutions and organic-certified pest products. And we continue to explore more effective ways we can wash them off our veg before we pack your boxes. And at the end of the day, we accept that when growing food, and when living life, we can’t eliminate all our struggles.

Fortunately, snails and slugs don’t pose a risk to human health, and they can simply be washed or picked off your veg and fed to the birds. So, when you find one of these little guys in your veg box, think about them as a certified ‘snail’ of approval for our chemical-free farming practices.

Enjoy!

Lindsay Burlton
Fair Food Coordinator

In your box:

Note: We sometimes need to make changes to what we pack in your veg box based on the quantity or quality of produce that we can harvest and source. If you have any questions about what is in your box, don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].

Did you know?

Water celery is an aquatic plant that grows naturally in and around watercourses in Eastern and South-East Asia. We grow it in the damp gullies between the swales that we’ve built around the farm to catch water and passively irrigate our fruit trees and market garden. When using water celery in the kitchen, think of it as parsley with a celery taste. Its luscious stalks are also delicious chopped up in a stir-fry.