Use Beer to Get Rid of Snails in Your Garden
Snails and slugs have long been giving backyard gardeners and organic farmers headaches. These small, slimy creatures reproduce quickly and voluminously, and feed on the leaves and roots of your carefully tended plants. Small seedlings and delicate plants can be quickly devastated by snails and slugs. Fortunately, there are several effective and natural ways to keep snails from eating your garden plants. The guide below details one of the most popular methods - how to use beer to get rid of snails in your garden.
Steps
- Find a suitable container for your beer trap. Killing snails with beer is a simple process - you simply attract the slugs to an open container of beer, into which they fall in and drown. Suitable containers for making these beer traps include plastic drinking cups, leftover yogurt containers, and the bottoms of plastic soda bottles.
- The container should be deep enough to allow slugs and snails to fall in and be unable to crawl back out. Deep containers also prevent the beer from evaporating in the sun too quickly.
- The container must be watertight so that the beer does not simply leech out into the surrounding soil. Paper-based ice cream pint containers are not a good option, for example, as they tend to degrade too quickly.
- Bury your beer trap container in your garden's soil. Take your cup and a hand trowel out into your garden. Begin digging a hole for the container until it fits snugly into the hole with the mouth of the cup precisely at ground level (the slugs should be able to fall into the cup easily from ground level). Backfill the hole with soil if necessary to achieve a sturdy fit.
- The location of your beer trap is important. It should be placed near enough to your garden so that snails are attracted to the beer instead of your plants.
- If you have a small garden, a single beer trap is often sufficient. However, you could consider placing several beer traps around the perimeter of a larger garden.
- Fill the container with beer. When the container is buried, fill it about 80 percent full with any type of beer. Snails and slugs are attracted to both the yeast and the carbohydrates in the beer; they will fall into the cup and drown.
- Pick the snails out of the beer trap daily. Check the beer trap each day for snails and slugs. You can either remove the cup from the soil and pour the whole mixture out, or you can pick the dead snails out with tweezers to preserve the beer for continued use. Refill the beer when it evaporates to a low level.
- Adjust the snail trap setup to protect pets. Of course, the open-top design of this type of snail trap can lead curious dogs and cats to consume the beer; it can also attract wasps and other unwanted pests. If this is the case, you can adjust the design using a plastic soda bottle.
- Cut a door into the soda bottle using sharp scissors. The door should be a rectangular opening placed about halfway up the bottle's height. The opening should be wide enough for snails to enter.
- Bury the plastic bottle until the bottom of the door is lined up with the surrounding ground. Pour beer in through the opening until the beer level is just below the door.
- Place the cap onto the bottle. With this design, snails can still fall into the beer through the small door, but the beer is less accessible to pets and unwanted pests.
Tips
- If you do not have beer handy, you can make an effective mixture by combining honey, water, and bread yeast. Simmer the ingredients together until thoroughly dissolved. The exact ratios are not important.
Things You'll Need
- Plastic cup
- Hand trowel
- Beer
- Tweezers
- Soda bottle
- Scissors
