Happy hour in the garden

One of the nice perks about having a garden is watching the animal life attracted to the flowers. With careful planning and selection, you can attract flittery butterflies, buzzing bees, and tiny hummingbirds to your yard -- those creatures that amuse and delight us with their antics, and that help pollinate to produce more lovely flowers.

Or, with careful planning and selection, you can attract the animal life in MY garden, which consists of: wasps and slugs.

In an effort to encourage the slugs, at least, to stop their destruction of the flowers, I have mobilized a highly technological device for catching them, consisting of a cat food can and beer ("It's good beer, too," bemoans the neighbor who gave me my "starter" bottle). Although I do not fully understand the mechanism behind this procedure, I do know that slugs like beer, and that once coaxed into a container of it, they rarely leave of their own free will. This, of course, is the idea.

Of course the slugs in MY garden do not follow typical slug protocol. I have yet to catch one actually inside the can. They are always on their way to it, or on the side of the can, as if the effort of making it up and over the lip is just too much, and if someone could just toss down a drop or two to them they would be satisfied with that.

Because the slugs that have so far been caught appear to be not yet fully mature, my sister is concerned that the slugs are not of age to be drinking, and that we may be running an illegal operation, not to mention that we are hooking a whole generation of slugs on evil drink. But since the whole idea of the can and beer operation is to rid the area of slugs, permanently, I personally am not too much concerned with how this is accomplished. Indeed, every slug caught causes great celebration. Someday, I'm sure -- if it hasn't happened already -- someone will become alarmed with how slugs are being treated in yards such as mine, and issue a report on slug eradication titled The Ethical Treatment of Slugs in the Home Garden (with a Particular Emphasis on Juveniles). This person will, of course, have a garden that attracts only butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds.

In the meantime, the Slug Happy Hour continues in my yard.