Slug observations and beetroot-seedling salad

I've been experimenting a bit with the beer traps. I have two now because they only seem to be effective for a radius of up to about a metre. My initial thought was that I could just fish out the dead slugs and snails (with a stick, not my fingers) and keep using the same beer the next night, but it turns out that slugs and snails find beer that their dead brethren have been  floating in for several hours about as appealing as we do. It turns out that really you need to change the beer pretty much every day to achieve a nightly round of slug slaughter.

Which leads me onto my next observation, which is that unlike me, slugs are just as attracted to Sainsbury's Basics 2% lager (4 pack for £1.05) as they are to Becks.

This makes it a lot more feasible to keep replacing the beer every day - although I'm hoping that by the end of the four pack I'll have devastated the garden's slug population and won't have to keep replenishing the slug trap all summer. I've already killed dozens (partly because it rained one day and I went round killing the ones who came out to enjoy the damp - which made me feel a lot guiltier than killing them with beer does), and I still tend to find at least 3 per beer trap whenever I give them a refill with the fresh stuff.

Other news from the vegetable patch is that my beans have finally sprouted, but one has been killed by having its top broken off.

I suspect a marauding cat – although I haven't yet witnessed any cats visiting the garden. I do hope I didn't tread on it by accident. I wouldn't put it past me. I planted another bean to make myself feel better, but unless we have a very long summer, I think that might have been too late.

In other news from the garden, I decided to use the beetroot seedlings I thinned from my line of beetroot to decorate my salad. I checked on the Internet to make sure you could eat them and the Internet says both the leaves and the seedlings are edible (and I haven't suffered any ill effects, so the Internet appears not to be lying). On their own, the seedlings tasted just like beetroot, but their flavour was swamped by the rest of the salad, so in the end they were largely just decoration.