This is part of the organic approach, I'm not just going to spray the hell out of the plants and obliterate all that crawls or walks through my garden. There are lots of nice little bugs that do nice little jobs. Which is why, even when using an organic insecticidal soap you spray it at night, preferably on the little buggers. The soap has very little persistence and by the time you sun loving insect buddies return they won't notice a thing.
On my potatoes I found, in two of the buckets, these guys:
I haven't identified them yet, but I sure as hell smooshed their potato loving bellies all over my driveway. I also noticed earwigs in a number of places. This surprised me less since I recently caught a bunch of them. That brings me to the story of my first night time outing.
After reading about the nocturnal habits of vege loving bad guys I went for an evening stroll around my garden. I happened across a massive yellow slug perched ridiculously atop a green bean seedling. I didn't think to get my camera as I was too flabbergasted to think at all. It was like seeing an elephant perched in an apple tree, munching away! I grabbed the little bugger and introduced him to the afterlife and proceeded to research how to deal with slugs. I was convinced that these were the culprits in some seedling damage that I had noticed.
Turns out there are a couple organic ways of dealing with slugs. Of course the most direct is simply to go outside at night and hunt them down. Another way is to take a small container, a dish perhaps, and put some beer in it and leave it out at night. The greedy little bastards will help themselves without so much as a thank you and will rightfully drown. This was a fine excuse to buy a six pack of Gritty's Vacationland summer ale. As much as I dislike slugs I didn't have the heart to send them to their grave using a crappy beer. Besides I like buying local and Gritty's is made in Maine.
The morning after I set my traps I had no slugs, but legions of earwigs. Turns out they have a taste for fine local brews as well. It also turns out they can't swim well when drunk. Earwigs are a bit faster when the lights are turned on and so they're a bit harder to catch in the act. The dishes of beer serve nicely in this respect. It is a shame to waste good beer, but more of shame to let good veges go to the tummies of these little rascals.
The beer dish trap is something I'm pretty sure I've heard from my folks when I was young, but like most kids I didn't really listen a whole lot. Another tactic that I hadn't heard was sprinkling crushed egg shells on your garden soil. Turns out slugs don't fancy crawling over sharp pokey things and your soil won't mind the extra calcium from the shells. Its a win win.
One last note: night crawlers crawl at night. Yeah I 'knew' this but I hadn't ever seen it. Although they crawl pretty fast, so perhaps they deserve a flashier name: Night Runners...
Make money with night crawlers, fisherman love them but hate going out at night to look for them.
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