my own garden
Pittsburgh
Summer 1993
Carol said, “Put a dish of beer in the garden. It will attract the slugs and keep them from eating our vegetables.” She even gave me a couple of attractive ceramic bowls.
After getting over the initial shock of feeding beer to anything non-human, and well aware that slugs have bad taste, I picked a cheap beer — $7.59 for the case of 16 ounce bottles — poured it into each attractive dish and set them out. Then I went in for the night.
The next morning revealed a sight so disgusting I had to get my camera. Each dish was full to the brim with slimy slugs, squeezed in and piled upon each other like a flesh sale. What the hell are you supposed to do with a dish full of fresh, drunken, drowned slugs? I won’t tell you what I did with them because you will never want to eat in my kitchen again, but they are gone, and my garden vegetables survived to grow full, healthy, tasty and most importantly, slug-free.
