Farming snails 2: Choosing snails; Care and harvesting; Further improvement: Harvesting your snails: What to do with the snails you harvest

Farming snails 2: Choosing snails; Care and harvesting; Further improvement
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Preface

The snails

Choosing your snails

Putting your snails in the pen

When to take out the fully grown snails

Taking care of your snails

Wet the food and shelter plants and moisten the ground

Tend the food and shelter plants

Take away the weeds and creeping grass

Feeding your snails other kinds of food

Building the second pen

When to build the second pen and how to build it

Putting snails in your second pen

Harvesting your snails

When to harvest your snails

How to harvest your snails

What to do with the snails you harvest

Preparing snails for cooking

Further improvement

Building the third pen

Building a bigger pen

Taking better care of your snails

What to do with the snails you harvest

208. If you are going to sell the snails, you can carry them to the market in containers like the ones above. However, you must be very careful not to hurt them or break their shells.

209. Remember, snails with clean shells and well- cared- for snails will sell better at the market.

210. If you want to keep the snails for you and your family to eat later, you can store them alive in containers filled with material such as sawdust or chopped maize husks.

211. That way you can keep them for as long as six to eight weeks before you use them. The drawings below show you how to store snails this way.

1 a box is a good container to store snails in

A box

2 cover the bottom of the box with about 5 cm of sawdust or chopped maize husks

Cover the bottom of the box with sawdust

3 carefully put in a layer of snails

4 cover the snails with about 3 cm of sawdust or chopped maize husks

Cover the snails

5 continue to do this until the box is full

Note: be sure that the top layer of snails is covered