Slugs!

A few weeks ago, I noticed my green bean leaves were suffering a little damage--some holes chewed through here and there. I hadn't seen this damage last year, so I wasn't sure what it was or how serious it was. I peeked under a few leaves but didn't see anything that might be causing the damage.  I didn't worry further.

It then escalated fairly quickly into my black bean leaves, and soon all the bean leaves were chewed through and yellow. While I was planning on letting the black beans dry and die back, I still recognized this was a problem.  And then, as I was pulling out dead pea vines, pondering the damage, I discovered the culprit stuck on my jeans: slugs! 

Well shit.

I didn't have slugs last year, so I decided to research the best way to get rid of the little suckers. I turned to my Fearless Food Gardening book, which made a strong and likable suggestion--beer. 

So I decided to lay some beer traps in the garden. They would consist of solo cups from my cabinet and a six-pack from the store. I will digress here to say that I debated for awhile about whether or not to waste a good beer on the slugs. In the end, I preferred to waste a good beer and have five other delicious beers to drink later, rather than find five bad beers in my fridge needing to be emptied. 

Anyway, I brought my cups, six-pack, bottle opener, and garden tools to my plot and got started laying traps.  The instructions are fairly simple. 

1. Dig a hole

2. Place cup in hole

3. Cut rim of cup down so it sits at soil level (garden shears were effective for this)

4. Put cup back in hole

5. Level dirt to rim so that the slugs can crawl in easily

6. Hunker down and try to clandestinely open a beer in public in the middle of the afternoon

7. Pour beer in cup

See? Easy. I ended up making three of these traps and spaced them throughout the garden.

Since slugs are night creatures, I gave them two nights to crawl to their deaths. Then I checked the traps. The first one had one fly in it. No slugs. The second trap held a stick. I was a little disappointed. But the third trap--oh, the carnage! It was packed full of slugs and centipedes.  I know there's a good metaphor here with beer, frat boys, and mornings after, but my brain is just not functioning enough to come up with it.  Pretend I just wrote something witty.

So, I would count the traps as successful (other than the fact that I waited too long to set them up).  And, of course, I love anything that encourages me to add more beer to my gardening experience.