Sep
20
So Slugs DO Like N/A Beer
Posted under Uncategorized
This post isn’t for the squeamish - or garden slug phobic…
Normally, slugs don’t bother me. Ever since I poured salt on one in high school and saw it squirming in agony and the resulting mess, I’ve pretty much left them alone and they’ve left me alone. Well, a few weeks ago, about 25 slugs broke our 20+ year peace treaty and started causing trouble.
The slugs in question began making their way to one of my window bird feeders. At first, I just ignored the one or two who were doing it. But before you know it there were 20 or more sliming their way up our kitchen window to get to the feeder. This wouldn’t be all that bad, but it was happening during family dinner time. My 5 year old couldn’t stop looking. My 9 year old thought it quite disgusting. Finally, I had had it.
I looked up on the Net how to get rid of slugs and found quite a few people recommend a “Beer Trap”. You make a beer trap by taking a small plastic cup or shallow pie pan and dig a hole where the top of the pan is somewhat level with the earth when placed in the hole. Then you fill it a third full or so with beer. The slugs will smell the beer and make their way to the trap and fall in, drowning in the hops and malt.
Since I don’t drink and my wife only drinks wine, we only had non-alcoholic beer in the fridge from the last party we had. I thought this probably wouldn’t work too well because I wasn’t sure what was supposed to attract the slugs. Since it wasn’t that difficult to test, I went ahead and emptied a yogurt container and rinsed it. Then I dug the hole under the window and placed the cup inside. I poured in about 1/3 of the beer and drank the rest.
Then we waited.
Dinner came and went without our normal slimy show. But I didn’t quite call the case closed (who knows maybe the slugs were up the street annoying someone’s dog food or something) until I checked the following day. When I finally remembered to check, I found the cup about 1/2 way full of dead slugs. Not the best sight in the world. I couldn’t help but think some of the slugs apparently died needlessly because they were undoubtedly floating on top of the other dead slugs - but perhaps they knew their fate and went ahead and drowned themselves. But I digress….
The only thing to do now is dispose of the cup.
Does anyone want to buy my Cup-O-Slugs?
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