You Can Use Beer To Keep Slugs And Snails Out Of Your Garden For Good

If you love drinking beer in your garden after a long day, you might be interested in knowing that slugs and snails do, too. Chowhound previously spoke to Sara Rubens, certified garden coach and founder of Seed to Sanctuary, on hacks to keep your vegetable garden pest-free, and one of her tips was to use beer: "These pests are attracted to the yeast in beer and when they crawl into a shallow container filled with beer that's sunk into the soil, they often fall in and drown." Setting up a local pub for the slugs in your garden may be the answer to eliminating these pests that can cause serious damage if left unchecked. 

Slugs and snails tend to hide under the shade of plants during the day but come alive at night, trawling your garden for food. Their nocturnal habits make them harder to catch, however there are telltale signs that these creatures have been making a home in your garden. These include trails of slime and chomped off bits of plants (think holes in your kale or bites out of your strawberries). Believe it or not, slugs and snails have thousands of microscopic teeth that they use to eat leaves and other freshly growing fruits and vegetables.

The good news is that, along with a broader action plan to attract more beneficial insects to your garden, you can target slugs and snails by placing beer traps in it. These traps lure the mollusks in with the smell of yeast and when they come to indulge, they will hopefully die happy by drowning in a pool of beer.

Making a beer trap is straightforward. All you need is a plastic container and some beer. Obviously, try and find the absolute cheapest beer you can for this project, slugs aren't beer snobs. Fill the container up to about three inches with beer and place it in your garden near the signs of slug activity. Make sure not to fill the container all the way up to the top. If you do, you are wasting beer for no good reason and making it easier for the pests to escape after they have stopped in for a drink. The container should be placed snugly in the soil but with a couple of inches left above ground to prevent other unsuspecting (beneficial) insects from falling in. The slugs will follow the scent of yeast (they do this with their feelers) and crawl up and over the edge of the container into the beer. 

Replace the beer every couple of days to keep the smell of yeast fresh. If you don't have access to beer you can use a combination of yeast, water, and flour instead. The key ingredient in these traps is not the alcohol but rather the yeast. These traps can be left out a bit longer than beer traps (about four days) and are significantly cheaper than beer. 

Another tip is to focus on your slug traps in the fall, right before your garden starts to freeze .  If you can curb the number of slugs breeding in the fall, there will be fewer eggs hatching in the spring, and hopefully by the time summer hits, the only creature drinking beer in the garden will be you.