Send in your beer ideas and win

Regular readers may remember my excitement at a garden project I started recently: a sunflower tepee for my daughter to play in this summer. The plan was to plant a ring of sunflower seedlings, wait ’til they’re about a metre high, then tie the tops together so they grow into a shady tent.

Unfortunately the slugs also had a plan, which went like this:

Step 1 Wait for a dark, wet night

Step 2 Creep out quietly, licking lips in slo-mo*

Step 3 Eat every damned seedling in sight

What is it with pests at this time of year? In the past I’ve found ‘digital control’ is the best way to beat snail infestations – this is where you go out at night with a head torch and pick the snails off by hand* – but snails have a nice convenient shell that makes picking them up easy (thoughtful of them, really), whereas picking up slugs gives you a revolting case of slime-hand and somehow seems a less appealing job on a wet spring night.

So this is where the beer comes in.

With a toddler in the house we can hardly leave bright blue pellets of poison scattered about, so my solution has been to pour beer into old takeaway containers and place them strategically around the garden. Every night a few more happy-looking slug corpses turn up in the beer traps, and every day our seedlings grow a little bigger and more capable of withstanding an attack on their own.

I’ve even made an important discovery: the beer from the bottom half of the bottle kills slugs far better than the beer in the top. So my official Green Ideas editorial advice on controlling slugs organically is to a) remove the first half of a bottle of beer in your preferred fashion, b) pour the rest of the beer into a shallow tray, then c) repeat until you have 3-4 beer traps scattered around the garden.

By this stage you will be feeling much more relaxed about pests in your garden – and everything else for that matter. However, there’s one – hic – hiccup in this scheme: every time it rains, the beer gets hopelessly diluted and washed away.

I’m thinking that a little house over the beer trap would be perfect – and it would be ideal if you could make one out of waste plastic, like an ice-cream container or something - so here’s the deal. The person who comes up with the best rain-proof beer trap for slugs and snails gets their design in the magazine – and wins a year’s subscription to Green Ideas (or another cool prize if you’re already a subscriber).

Just take a photo and email it in to enter. And if you know any teachers who might like to try the challenge with their class, please forward this email on – we’ll send some free back issues to any school that enters.

So go on – give it a go – you might enjoy the research and development phase…

Greg Roughan
 Editor, Green Ideas magazine

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