Snails Eating Vegetables In The Farm.

This incident occurred recently in my small farm. I just planted the seeds of vegetables "mustard greens, pakcoy, and swamp cabbage" in these two weeks. The growth of vegetable babies was well, but some leaves were damaged and I have a thought that it was caused by caterpillars because of my experienced before, every damages to the leaves is caused by caterpillars. Without long thinking again, I decided to use a low level pesticide toxic on tomorrow morning to kill the caterpillars.

Actually, I am an organic vegetables farmer and I have an opinion if uses a toxic of pesticide in low level and spraying it with thin thin on the leaves and uses that in early two weeks after planting and used only once for the crops that has the age of 30 days for harvesting season, it would not be affecting the quality result of organic vegetables itself as long as in the grow period, the fertilization of vegetables only uses manure fertilizer, otherwise do not chemical fertilizer.

Fortunately, my son, Kusuma, checked it again in the farm, looked for the caterpillars, he did not find any caterpillars there, on the leaves, even inside of the ground that usually in there the caterpillars hiding, he didn't find it. Because we planted our vegetables in the poly bags, my son decided to shift every poly bag to look what there at under or beside of poly bags was, and BooM....he found all of the snails was hiding on there, Wow..ten until fifteen was hiding and stay in below and beside of poly bags.

He found also, a snail was eating the leaves of mustard greens and that is a proved and made sure us that the snails eating the leaves of vegetables too and its before we never knew it. Finally, the damages of the leaves issues have been resolved. I did not use a toxic of pesticide in its tomorrow morning, I just watered the crops and made a plan to clean and take all of snails from every poly bags we had in the afternoon.

This is a learning for me that to be an organic farmer have to carefully to look every case that happen, so would not be make a mistake when take care the organic crops.

Love and compassion

Santosa Laksana.