Getting rid of garden slugs and saving the beer - Comox Valley Gardening

by Keith and Heather Nicol

Slugs eating our strawberries

      It has been a wet cool few weeks in Coastal B.C. and this has led to a field day for slugs in our garden. And this is just as the strawberries are ripening in early June. Slugs seem to like our berries and we don’t have a large strawberry patch so we are not that inclined to want to share them with the slugs. When we mentioned this to gardening friends they said that placing 1 “ of beer in some containers worked well for attracting slugs but who wants to waste beer. So we tried an online recipe for slug bait that included 2 cups of water, 2 tbsp of sugar, 2 tsp of flour and 1 tsp of yeast to see if it would work.

    

     We used  plastic mushroom containers, drink bottles and we cut the bottom off a plastic milk

We would rather not share our berries with the slugs

container and placed them out in our garden spaced about 3 feet apart near our strawberries with about 1 “ of slug bait mix in the container. Some were buried and some were not but it didn’t seem to make much difference—they all caught slugs. On our first night we had no strawberries eaten that we could see and we caught about a dozen slugs all together in 4 containers. So if slugs are bothering your garden in this cool, wet June spring in the Comox Valley or Vancouver Island in general then try this technique and let us know if you found that it worked. Check out the video below for details.