Damn slugs!!

Okay, so I like to garden. I enjoy the planting, the nurturing, the watching things grow, the beauty in the colors and scents. I do not, however, like the slugs (or the lawn with its constant required mowing and its DANDELIONS (arghhhhhhhhh!).... but I'll leave the lawn for a future rant) that comes with my garden.

Now, in general, I don't like to kill things. In fact, I don't REALLY want to kill the slugs. I just don't want them killing all my pretty (and sometimes expensive) plants. Yet, trying to reason with the slugs has not helped. Nor do they appear to be intimidated by my yelling and shaking a finger at them (go figure!). I've even resorted to taking the few I've seen actively munching on my plants and tossing them into the hedge at the back of my property. They can munch that hedge .... that thing is GIGANTIC ... it would take bazillions of them hundreds of years to kill it (okay, okay ... I may be exaggerating a WEE bit ... but really .... at least 50 years!). And if they didn't like the hedge I figure it would take said slug at least 6 months (at 0.00000004 miles per hour) to make it back to their favorite plants in my garden area and thus my plants would flourish this summer and I'd get to enjoy their beauty and the slugs can have them during the winter.

But yet .... the slugs are wiley creatures (you didn't know that, did ya?) and seem to hide during daylight hours and only come out once I'm comfortably ensconsced in comfy clothes and loathe to venture out into the damp, cool night. (the bastards!!) SO, I've browsed the web for anti-slug information and found many poisons I can buy to put down. But poisoning seems really cruel and plus I have cats that I would be concerned may be affected by it. Interestingly enough, I have also found a couple of sites that say placing beer into pie tins and setting in the garden will kill slugs. Now I'm thinking that death by beer drowning doesn't sound quite as cruel as death by poison. SOOO ... I finally tracked down expendable pie tins and expendable beer (shush to all you beer lovers screaming that NO beer is expendable) and set my cruel beer trap (mwahhhahahahahahahaaaa) this past Sunday night. Last night, even though a little leery of peering into said pie tin and seeing a mess of slug corpses, I took a peek and lo and behold many slugs. Yet ... not quite in the throws of death or decomposition as I had expected. In fact, were they REALLY hanging their wee heads over the rim and sucking down the beer?? I'm telling you ... instead of killing slugs I was apparently throwing a kegger! These guys were partying down like there was no tomorrow!! Disheartened ... I wandered over to check a few plants and when I came back I noticed that one slug had ventured INTO the pie tin. Ah ha ... I thought. Here we go. The sucker is dead. One down ... 5 million to go. But wait ... he's still MOVING. Yes, as I watched, he successfully slithered from one side of the pie tin .... completely UNDER the beer .... to the other side of the pie tin and back up the rim. If he had arms he'd a been high fiving the other slugs I'm sure. (it had to be a dare as in "hey fred, I dare you to slither the whole length of this thing ") Unbelievable. So this morning I ventured out and as I expected not a slug to be seen ... just little slug trails (albeit not very straight) from the rim of the tin off into the underbrush. Sigh. Damn drunken slugs!