Story Booth: Andreas Nussbaumer

Andreasnussbaumer: When you work with nature and growing vegetables, the first thing that you have to learn is to throw away all the knowledge. I learned, or I met a lot of very experienced gardeners. And most of them told me they are 20, 30, 40, 50 years gardeners, and every day when they walk out, they find things that they didn't experience before. So, the most important thing is to watch your vegetables, watch the nature, watch the surroundings.

And then, do what you think is right. And what we did with this slug story, or with the snails, is that we experienced that you cannot do anything against snails. You can buy this snail corn that kills them, of course. But we didn't want to do this, because of the slugs, and of course, also because of us, because it's poison.

So we didn't want to kill them. But what we learned is the slugs aren't evil. The slugs aren't killing your plants or your vegetables because they are happy about it. They just do what nature wants them to do, and this is a kind of garden police.

We grew lettuce, small plants of lettuce, and planted them. And below every plant, there were 5, 10, 15, 20 snails. But not eating the lettuce. And I proved, we had a lot of visitors, they thought we were lying.

And we invited them to come, and we showed them. We had these plates with 77 small lettuce plants on it. And under every plant were these small slugs. But they didn't do anything.

But when a plant was broken, because a chicken or a pig broke into our garden and hurt that plant. Or maybe they had too much water, or not enough water, or the soil was not perfect. Then the slugs came, and then it took, I don't know, one or maybe two days? And the plants were eaten.

So, what we learned is, when the snails are coming and eat your vegetables, don't do anything against the snails. Do something to make your vegetables stronger. Take care of them. Maybe you have to change the place, because we had two rows of paprika.

Oh, pepper, yeah? Two rows of pepper, 5 meters from each other. It was the same plant, because we grow them together. They were standing next to each other when we are growing them, and then we planted them into the soil.

And one row was eaten by the slugs, and the other one was totally healthy. And we tried to do it in the next year, plant again, and they also died. So, the question is not, what can I do against the snails? The question is, why is the pepper wrong here?

And what can I plant here? That is healthy. And that turned out, because we planted them. A different kind of vegetable, and there was no problem.

And that was a very, very interesting thing for us. Not to think, what can we do against boom, boom, boom. But to think, what does it tell us? What does it show us?

And what can we change and do now?