Sitting 126: Snails, aphids and tests

During your sojourn on the earth you meet a great many situations which can test your reactions to many things. You may come up against things like snails in the garden which are eating your plants and aphids who are sucking the sap from the plants thereby stunting its growth. The trouble is that you can easily kill them all off with poisons and chemicals and your plants will survive and flourish but, the birds and the hedgehogs will come along and eat the dead snails and will be poisoned by them, and other insects which you need in the garden will also be killed by the chemicals and in addition to this the chemicals will get into the water supply and everything which drinks or lives in the water will be affected.

The problem with which you are confronted seems to be unsolvable and whilst we would not give you a solution, if we had one, for then we would be interfering with your freewill choice, we would suggest that there are other solutions which, though not eradicating the problem will give you a bit of leeway.

One thing you can do is to plant out more than you need, another is to use natural sprays, you could find out what the snails find irresistible and plant them in a small corner somewhere. You can use garlic to deter aphids, and there are many other ways you can keep your garden pest free, or we should say almost pest free.

Once again we would seem to digress from the substance of our subject, but for good reason, by taking a different viewpoint we can very often find an alternative solution to our problems, and, though they may well not be ideal answers they are better solutions to the problem than wholesale destruction of one form of life for the sake of another form of life. So many of your problems can be solved by taking the middle way.