Sunday, April 10, 2011

Share your Beer with the Garden

The past few weeks I have been extremely busy at work, working day and night. Most of the time right before I leave I turn on the sprinkler system to water the garden before Bob makes his appearance. But as busy as I have been, there has been something a lot busier in my garden eating up all my leafy green vegetables.

Obviously you wont see any of the characters in play during the day, but on one cool morning I walked outside to see a slug crawling along on my cabbage plants. I wondered why my cabbage had holes in the center of them. I also noticed that all my leafy greens were affected by this. As bob came out and the flying insects started to wake, I also noticed a wasp fly to the cabbage plant where the slug was and it crawled in the cabbage. I thought this was weird because too, because first, I didn't know what the ole wasp was up to. But watching a little further I wondered if the wasp was preying on the slugs. I don't have any confirmation of this but it's very likely the wasp was hunting.

As I soaked all this in I realized that my garden was under assault. This is the type of creepy assault that's not noticeable. Its in your face everyday, but it's not alarming until it's to late. I have heard of the use of beer being used in the garden as a way to keep the slugs down but I really never bothered with giving this the attention I should; until now. Because as work has picked up I am not around to pick every slug off my plants and feed them to my chickens. So I decided to share some of my beer with my garden to see what happened. To my surprise this stuff works lethally well and even though I have cut down drinking beer sue to training for my next ultra-marathon, I will definitely continue to make beer runs for my garden .

How it works.... The yeast from the beer is to irresistible for the slugs to leave alone. They will come far and near from anywhere to the smell of beer and as they crawl slowly toward the smell of the beer, they literally dive right in and sink to the bottom and literally drowning in a drunken stooper. Beer is an easy, cheap, and effective way to control these beast that will damage your leafy greens in short time. At the first sign of holes in the middle of your plants, get a confirmation that you have slugs or snails and make a beer run. Thank God Georgia just passed legislation to buy Beer on Sundays. 

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