Beer Baiting

I noticed some holes in some of the leaves in Alice so I decided to try an organic snail/slug trap I'd heard about a few months ago.  Apparently those little slime creatures love beer (I mean, who doesn't?) so if you put some beer out in a shallow container they will flock to it instead of flocking to your plants.  I gathered my materials: small containers for the beer, beer*, something to cover the container, and something to dig a small hole.

Materials

Figure out where you want to put the traps.  I put one near the tomatoes and one near the zucchini since those were the plants that had been getting chewed on.  Then dig a shallow hole so that the top of your container is at about the same level as the ground.  We want to make it as easy as possible for the snails and slugs to get to the beer.  Once you get your hole dug place the container in there and tuck it in a bit so it doesn't spill too easily.

Fill up your container with the beer and then you want to cover the trap.  The perpetrators are more cozy in this dark, cave like scenario.  You can use anything for this as long as there is still an opening for them to get in.  I used to have a couple pet rats so I used their old house as a cover.

*I brief note about beer.  I love beer and generally do not condone "wasting" it.  The beer I used for this was from the beer of the month club.  What should have been the best birthday gift ever turned out to be a lot of very disappointing beers with the same bad aftertaste.  I suspect this has to do with the beer getting too hot in the shipping process but I am not an expert so I'm not sure what went wrong exactly.  Before pouring the beer out I did taste it to make sure it was a bad one. Other possible ways to get beer are:

• Have a party, people always seem to leave half filled beers around.  
• that last bit of beer in the bottom of a bottle that a lot of people leave
• buy some cheap stuff