Snails on Fruit Trees

[Malcom "Mal" Reynolds]

I have two mulit-variety fruit trees and have been picking snails off of the trunk and lower branches, but I was wondering if they are harmful to the trees?

[Billy]

Naw, they only eat the leaves.

[rhubarb]

Snails can be harmful to young trees eating through tender bark or to trees with low-growing leaves. Most often the latter are citrus where they cause the most damage.

We have had snail infestations on citrus trees which required some serious hand-picking on an almost daily basis. However, the tree still produced quite well.

If these are young fruit trees and not yet well established, you are well advised to continue picking the snails off. If the tree is older and larger, it's not as big an issue. We currently have a very mature large apple tree which often has slugs and snails on the lower trunk, but these do not seem to cause a problem to the tree.

[songbird]

rhubarb wrote: ...

surrounding the tree with a layer of something they don't like to crawl across can help. some people use strips of copper. we've not needed anything like that here even for slugs.

some species are quite good with garlic butter...

not many above ground snails here for long. the birds get them.

songbird

[Malcom "Mal" Reynolds]

I pick the snails when I can. I've had the trees for two years and they've doubled-tripled in size so I consider them fairly well established. I've seen no problems I would attribute to snails

thanks