What is Hurting My Hydrangeas

by: Anne Haynes

Since this is my first spring and summer in my new garden I decided to plan my favorite flower; hydrangeas! I love hydrangeas and they remind me of an Mrs. Jones in Saratoga, CA. Mrs. Jones is the mother of my friend Suzanne Jones. Suzanne and I spent many a days swimming and diving at the Jones family home and Mrs. Jones was truly the expert on hydrangeas. She had hydrangeas in wine barrels and all over her garden area. It was an exquisite setting and I really enjoyed learning more about hydrangeas from Mrs. Jones. So, now with my own land, I can plant as many hydrangeas as I want! This spring I planted three; one in a large container and the other two in the ground. I named the three hydrangeas Hope, Humility and Happiness. It's easier to remember the names of my flowers when they are associated with feelings I keep so close to my heart. I've been watering them and watching them closely and recently I noticed the leaves look like they've been eaten on by an insect or slug. Let's remember than I'm new to gardening, so I'm really clueless in diagnosing the attack on my hydrangeas. But the picture to the left is what I was looking at when I thought I had a slug problem.

I found a blog post on fighting slugs using beer! Yes beer is a natural killer of slugs in a garden. Apparently, the slugs are attracted to the yeast in the beer and when the slug finds it's way to the pool of beer, they get drunk and die. This was my first experiment with using booz to kill bugs.

The post I read (sorry I don't have the link) stated using a shallow dish is the best way to capture the leaf eating slugs. The suggested shallow dish was a jar lid. I only had one jar lid, so I used a ramekin on Humility and the jar lid on Happiness. One of the comments on the blog post I read mentioned the slugs captured at the beerfest were so small you could hardly see them in the jar.

This was all the information I needed to give this a shot and capture the slug leaf eating pests. After I got home from work I planted my traps and went to bed feeling better about Humility and Happiness knowing that they knew I was taking care of their spiritual needs.

I woke up the next morning poured myself a cup of coffee and ventured to the front of my house to check on the hangovers. Um ya, I got ROACHES and guess what? They were dead! Whoever said roaches will live through a nuclear war didn't think about beer filled bombs. After taking a closer look into the jar lid and the ramekin I noticed there were baby slugs. But I wasn't satisfied that slugs were the only problem, those slugs were just too small. So, I planned for a weekend trip to HomeDepot to get another opinion.

A couple of nights later I was in the bathroom and a ROACH flew across my bathroom floor. In the 10 months I've been in my new home I've never seen a roach and now after the beerfest the roaches have found a way into my house! I'm not sure if the beer brought to roaches into my house or because I killed so many of them the other roaches got scared and decided to find a new place to roam. Regardless, if you have slugs I'm sold on using the beer method to kills them.
But again, I'm just too new to this gardening thing to truly know what I'm doing, so take my suggestions with a grain of yeast.

If you know anything about killing slugs and just pest in general please leave me a comment!