Week of May 10

SLUGFEST BEERFEST.  Our neighbors,  Dave and Laura, give us a couple dozen coleus each spring.  Half I plant at the sunny end of the Palm Row, and half I plant along the driveway in the shade of the live oak trees.  This year, the latter group have done poorly, with two or three plants dead from something eating across their stems.  I had not seen any culprits, but I suspected slugs might be the cause of the damage.  Nonny and I do not like to use pesticides and some of the slug treatments are powerful.  So we tried the old stand-by, beer.  I took a couple of styrofoam plates that ground meat came on and a couple of large screw lids and dug them in so they were even with the ground level.  Around dusk, I filled them with a bottle of Yingling lager beer (I didn’t have anything cheaper).  The next morning I checked my project to find hundreds of small to medium sized drowned slugs filling the plates and caps.  I did not take any photos as it was quite disgusting.  I discarded the dead slugs and repeated the process the next night.  Around midnightI went by to check on them and found the same thing!  However, by the next morning, something had come by and drank the beer and ate the slugs!  I suspect it was our resident armadillo.  We now do this 3-4 nights a week.  The coleus seem less eaten, but we worry the armadillo may become overfed with his new beer and escargot diet.