Every now and again the good folk of Gilgandra receive an urgent request from the public high school and traipse through their gardens to help out.

“We send out an SOS for more snails and people bring them into the school,” said support unit teacher Wendy Howchin.

Gilgandra High is the only NSW school involved in a snailbreeding program with Snails Bon Appetite in the Hunter Valley, who market the specially grown Helix aspersa escargot for restaurant tables around Australia. Helix aspersa is the common brown garden snail, but when it is fed a special diet over nine months the dark flesh turns a creamy colour and the hermaphrodites reach a size of around three centimetres.

Mrs Howchin said the program, now in its second year, was initially established for support unit students with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities. But it was now so popular that other students were involved, especially those studying agriculture.

The students “have no problem at all” handling the snails and some had eaten them with garlic or tempura style.

“They are very nice; the flavour is strong,” Mrs Howchin said.

The school has almost completed construction of a new snail enclosure for its next batch of snails. There have been up to 2,000 snails in the breeding program and the school receives up to 50 cents a snail.

Snails Bon Appetite visits the school to do quality control checks and has hosted the special education students during an excursion to its Hunter Valley property.

Helen and Robert Dyball, who started snail farming eight years ago, have a network of growers who breed the snails up to restaurant quality and sell them back to Snails Bon Appetite where they are purged and processed for sale.

Snails, incredibly, live for up to eight years in the wild if they can avoid predators or the shoe of a gardener.

Snails Bon Appetite either supplies the starter snails for the breeding program or some growers, like Gilgandra High, use eggs from local snails and start plumping up the babies. Snails lay 90 to 130 eggs about five centimetres deep in the ground.

As well as a special dry mix, the snails are fed calves’ powdered milk, fruit and vegies on their journey to becoming edible escargot. Mrs Dyball said the Gilgandra special education students were rather fond of their snails.

“Snails are light and small and the kids can pick them up and they’ll crawl over them. The students can become really attached to them.”