Whether you grow flowers, have a small vegetable garden or just a few herbs at the side of the house, the milk snail has likely been annoying you. Plant nurseries said they’ve sold record amounts of snail bait this season.Aberfeldy, in Paget, sells both a toxic and an organic bait but according to manager Kent Smith, most people have been opting for the toxic bait.“People are preferring the more toxic one because it works faster and they just want to get rid of them,” he said.Lindsay Sousa, manager of Sousa’s, in Southampton, said the store only carries organic snail bait.“We carry two, one that works only on snails and one that kills snails as well as earwigs, cutworms, sow bugs, pill bugs and slugs,” she said. “It is safe to use around your vegetables, flowers, children and pets.”You can make your own bait with beer. The snails are attracted to the yeast in the brew and will come out, drink it and die if you add poison, or drown if you make the beer deep enough.Farmer Carlos Amaral pointed out that this method is not practical for commercial growers. Farmer Tom Wadson said: “I’ll crush them and keep the beer for myself.”Government entomologist Claire Jessey and Natural History Museum curator Robbie Smith both advise the public to pick the snails and throw them in a bucket of salty water to kill them, or throw them overboard, as fish will eat them, or freeze them and discard in the trash.“Many people feel it’s more humane to freeze them,” said Ms Jessey.If you have chickens you can try feeding the snails to them although Mr Wadson said his birds could only eat the young snails with soft shells. He said his geese would eat them as they graze in a field.Collecting them and throwing them in wooded areas is not helpful as the snails are an agricultural pest. According to our scientists, there’s no need to feel guilty about killing them as they do pose a threat to our crops.According to Mr Smith, when you don’t kill them you are only allowing them to multiply and prolong or exacerbate the problem.