Slug trap

There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that my seeds are starting to come up (I think the ones in the picture below are radishes, but I didn't have anything to make labels out of when I planted them and I've forgotten what order I put them in, so I'm not 100% sure).

The good news ... seeds sprouted

 The second bit of good news is that the brassicas at one end of my anti-butterfly tunnel are still all healthy and leafy and there are no caterpillars or butterfly eggs in sight.

The good news 2 ... brassica seedlings with uneated leaves

The bad news is that pretty much all the brassica seedlings at the other end of the tunnel have little left in the way of leaves.

Leafless seedling post pest attack

One of the worst affected is actually in a slug ring. I think it's possible I didn't push the slug ring firmly enough into the ground, as it did look like there might have been room for a small slug (a baby?) to slither underneath and my least eaten plants are in other slug rings. Alternatively, perhaps my garden has other pests that strip seedlings of all their leaves. I've now pushed the ring more firmly into the ground and am keeping my fingers crossed that the plant can grow a new leaf before it dies.

Anyway, the upshot is that I've decided to fight back ... in the form of a beer trap.

Beer trap

Slugs love beer almost as much as students do. So you can use it both as bait and the means of death, all in one fell swoop. What you do is buy some beer then half-fill a plastic or glass container (in my case a plastic cup) with beer. Actually, in my case I quarter filled it, as I didn't want to waste good drinking beer on slugs. If it doesn't catch any tonight I guess I'll just have to open another bottle tomorrow :)

The idea is they climb in, start drinking and drown. It's got a stick in it because one of the websites I read about it said that slugs and snails won't be able to use it to climb out but other creepy crawlies that are beneficial for the garden (such as the ground beetle) can crawl up it and get out if they accidentally get trapped. That's also why the rim of the cup is about 2 - 3 cm above soil-level, so that it doesn't catch insects walking along the soil.