Were the plants bought from a garden centre? Even if they're a few years old the granules they used could still be intact. Some pellets are made with plastics or resin so they take an age to break down if they're undisturbed.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
They were, but bought as 9cm pots. Even if there were pellets in them, which I don’t recall being the case, then there are far too many in my pots for 9cm worth of soil. There are dozens and dozens of the things in my pots, mainly in the top few inches and not evenly distributed throughout the compost. It’s a mystery as I don’t see any signs of pest activity at all and the plants themselves seem to be okay. I’ve noticed them since late spring/early summer and they haven’t changed or degraded at all. The stuff inside is quite gelatinous and hasn’t dried out or seeped out either. If they are snail eggs then I’m very grateful that they haven’t hatched! 😊
I’ve tried to add the photo but its not working. I chose it, selected add, but when the little box comes up it’s asking for image url or I can drag and drop. Haven’t got a clue about urls and drag and drop just isn’t happening. I’m using an iPad and split screen for drag and drop. 🤷🏻♀️
Image shows them spread all over top of compost (and within it) and not clustered at all, which I would have expected with snail/slug eggs.
Normally I would say they look very much fertiliser granules, but you say they are squidgy. Maybe a batch went wrong somehow and instead of cracking their contents over time into the earth, they ... set.
It is also a lot to see on the surface if you didn't put them there. Ever.
It’s definitely not fertiliser granules. That photo is a dwarf Korean lilac which I put in the pot spring ‘21. It hasn’t ever met a fertiliser granule. I used rootgrow and Vitax Q4 on planting and use liquid seaweed to fertilise. The yellow blobs have been there all summer and nothing has hatched out of them. Even if the ones on top had fried in the sun, I would have expected the ones within the compost to have hatched but absolutely nothing at all has happened. They are also in a number of other pots, again, nothing has happened to them or the plant, apart from them appearing from nowhere.
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