Yes and no. I have a huge problem with slugs and snails in my garden and last night I resorted to beer traps to help me deal with them. What you do is get some beer (the cheapest you have easy access to, slugs and snails aren't fussy) and put it in a jar or other similar container in the garden near where you're having a particular problem. I've made a little hollow in the soil and leaned mine at an angle on it to give the traps some protection from rain and to make it easier for the slugs and snails to get in. This proved a successful approach. I came out this morning to a large number of dead slugs and a smaller number of dead snails, despite snails being the more visible problem in my garden. I'd estimate I got about a dozen across my two containers. So, to that extent the answer is yes, beer traps are successful. The traps stopped some slugs and snails from getting to nearby plants last night. I can't see any more damage than I could yesterday. But the answer is also no, because they didn't prevent slug damage in the rest of my garden and they will only prevent damage for as long as the traps continue working with their existing beer or I refill them. And the original beer doesn't work for long, even if you sieve out the slugs and snails like I did to stop them quickly reeking of rotting slug.
So why did I choose to use them and am I glad I did?
I have two or three particular problems that I wanted to solve with them. The first is that this year slugs and snails have completely stripped a large number of my climbing beans of leaves and largely stripped even more, even though I waited until the beans had grown quite big and therefore the leaves were tougher and less enticing before I planted them out. This has happened despite my best attempts to kill any slugs or snails I catch in the area.
The second problem is that slugs or snails are now eating my lettuce, despite me putting it in slug rings. Slug rings do help, but they're not infallible and I suspect mine could do with a bit of a clean. Also anything that touches or overhangs them can provide a bridge in for enterprising slugs and snails, and the onions keep doing that here. And in addition to that, once slugs learn they can climb over them for a worthwhile meal, they tend to keep doing it.
Thirdly, they've eaten an awful lot of the leaves of my squashes and although I've grown more squashes from seed in pots, I'm worried the same thing will happen again as soon as I put them in the soil, especially if they overhang the slug ring.
I put beer traps out to deal with two of these three situations. The nearby slugs and snails were attracted to the beer, climbed in to drink it and drowned - I'm not sure why they do drown, as at the angle mine were, they could theoretically easily have climbed out again. Nevertheless, they did. So instead of eating my plants, the slugs and snails died drinking my beer - or more accurately my husband's beer, as I accidentally picked up the wrong bottle from the fridge. However, you can find hundreds of slugs and snails in a garden even as small as mine. So more will come.
If you have a significant problem with them like I do, just using a beer trap or two won't diminish your overall numbers much unless you have ready access to a large amount of very cheap beer (e.g. home brew gone wrong) and you keep refilling them regularly because they only work for a day or two on the original beer.
After having established that the beer traps weren't cutting it, I went back to doing slug patrols. What you do is wear gardening or washing-up gloves and fill a large pot with water and a very large squirt of washing-up liquid - probably about 2 or 3 times the amount you'd use to wash up. Then, when it's getting dark and especially if it's just rained, you go round the garden and pick up every slug and snail you can find and pop them in the water in the pot. Without the washing-up liquid they would just climb out again, but with the washing-up liquid they drown. About 9 or 9.15 pm is a good time of day to do this in London in June, as the slugs and snails have started venturing out, but it's still light enough to see them. I have now done this several days in a row and have finally largely halted the damage to my beans. It took about 3 days before the number I found started to decrease. I've not yet got so far that I don't find any. I think I must have killed a couple of hundred this way now.
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