Their numbers are legion.
They haunt the dark hours between dusk and dawn.
Our situation is desperate; we are nearly undone.
They haunt the dark hours between dusk and dawn.
Our situation is desperate; we are nearly undone.
Over-dramatic? You might not think so if you'd seen your healthy little petunia transplants - the ones you started from seed - reduced to this overnight:
And what's up with that anyway? This is the kind of damage I would expect if I'd set out marigolds. I once had an entire flat of marigolds reduced to sticks over night.
I'm not an especially selfish person; I don't mind sharing. I'm willing to accept a little nibbling here and there on the veggies in exchange for the sure knowledge that my food is free of pesticides and other chemicals. Up to a point, but we were starting to have some serious damage, the kind that makes lettuce leaves completely unusable and that is unacceptable, even by my relaxed standards.
War!
I resorted to my first line of defense, crack cocaine for slugs, otherwise known as Deadline, with disappointing results. In all fairness to the manufacturers, my Deadline is at least three years old, so it may be that it's outlived it's usefulness.
I turned to the internet in search of a chemical-free solution and decided to try beer traps. This is June in Washington. It rains. And then it rains some more. You can't just set out an open container with beer in it. In a couple of days (or a couple of hours, depending on the day), the beer would be so diluted, the slugs would be thanking you for for the man-made lake and hauling in lettuce leaves for picnics on the shore. If I wanted to use beer, I'd need some way to protect it from the rain.
I happened to have "a few" yogurt cups stored away, waiting for a new purpose, so I decided to put them to use as beer traps. I cut Vs in the rims of the yogurt cups and buried them in the soil so that the bottom of the Vs were flush with the soil surface.
Then I filled the cups about half full of beer.
You think this isn't serious? I sacrificed one of these:
But don't tell my husband.
Then I placed cedar shakes over the yogurt cups, weighted them down with stones and...waited.
While we're waiting, did you know slugs can live for up to seven or eight years? I didn't, but that sure explains the size of some of the slugs in my garden.
I went out the next morning to check my traps and was a little underwhelmed with the results. The traps had worked, but not, as far as I could tell in the way intended, i.e., slugs falling into the beer and drowning. (Guiness is really dark! I couldn't see anything in there!) But I had "caught" a few slugs that had crawled under the shingles to hide.
Now I'm back to my old tried and true method of slug defense, and it appears to be working. Each day I go out to the garden during the slug "rush hours," between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. and again between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. (Is it any wonder that Satan's minions work graveyard shift?) and hand pick and dispose of the slugs I find. It appears to be working. Each day I'm finding fewer slugs than the day before.
And how is it that I "dispose" of the slugs I find?
Snip!
