Sunflowers are tasty. Not the seeds, the leaves...

...if you happen to be a snail, a common garden snail, Helix aspersa, my nemesis.

OK, I should have expected a snail attack from the moment I planted the seeds. I've been focused on conifers for so long that I've almost forgotten how snails like to eat tasty young seedlings. Somehow I convinced myself that it was going to be OK, then forgot about the sunflowers for a while. Now I have a bunch of half-eaten sunflowers, covered in bits of black snail poop. A few are flowering, which seems to be reward enough for my son.

To add insult to injury, though, it turns out that my young son loves the snails. He has collected them in an old yogurt container and is feeding them lettuce (not iceberg, mind you, but romaine). We were at the garden center the other day and he asked me to buy some "snail food"--a box with a picture of snails and slugs on the front of it. I gently explained that it wasn't really snail food. I should have gone ahead and bought it.

That's OK. The sunflowers are semi-ruined for this year anyway. Next year I'll put down snail poison as soon as I see the seedlings start to come up.