Club Med for Slugs


Echrai’s reply on my ant post got me thinking about the year I turned my strawberry garden into a Club Med for slugs.

The slugs were eating my strawberries. They’d gnaw a hole and suck out the juices and let the rest of the strawberry rot.

Strawberries are hard to grow and wonderful on your cereal especially because you have to plod out to get them on an early summer morning - still sleepy-eyed and coiffed in bed-head extraordinaire. Early morning strawberries are warm and dewy and all you have to do is swipe them under the faucet for a couple of seconds and then slice them up for breakfast, that is if you don’t just eat them all right over the sink with the water still running.

Unlike the store varieties (that look like real strawberries only much huger and redder), these smaller pinker versions packed flavor. Let’s see a show of hands, who remembers when strawberries actually had flavor??

Okay back to the slug story.

So the slugs had invaded the strawberry garden and I read, like Echrai suggested, that if you put out a bowl of beer (which I hate to part with because I adore beer) the slugs will come and drown in the beer and leave your strawberries alone.

May I say this is not so. It might be so if you choose a bowl with high slippery sides, but I chose a soup bowl with low sloping sides. Big mistake.

When I timidly peeked at the bowl to see how many dead slugs and more important, how many strawberry’s lives saved – I was stunned.

A bunch of drunk slugs were leaning up on the side of the bowl as if they were chilling in a hot tub filled with beer. They were happy, healthy, drunk and slightly pink where the strawberry juices had stained their lovely see-through gray bodies.

I was out a Stella Artois (all I had at the time) my strawberries were decimated and the happy inebriated slugs were going to give me a good neighbor award.

Nothing like a hearty meal of strawberries topped off with a couple of pints of good beer and a nice place to rest and chat with your friends.

(This post dedicated to Echrai for her beer idea and Spurious Plum for being blogger’s resident expert on fruits.)