A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer

Something's been hard at work in the plot of late. But just what has been a mystery - because it certainly wasn't me (if you hadn't already guessed), and so the field of suspects is left rather large. Whatever it is, it has been busy all night looking after my broccoli and bean seedlings - and by "looking after" I mean I'm euphemistically using the phrase to avoid invoking any memories that are best dealt with in the fetal position.

When I get up in the morning and find all the leaves of my broccoli mysteriously absent, I'm thinking two usual suspects. Slugs and caterpillars. All this rain might infer the former; but I haven't been able to find any around the garden, and there certainly aren't any trails to be found in the morning. I'm also pretty sure its not the latter, because I've never known a cabbage-white butterfly to lay eggs on only enough broccoli for a single caterpillar to starve on.

So I figured I'd need to do a lit-tle more detective work. And with so much hard work going on, I figure there's only one way to lure the culprit into a trap - because a hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer. And besides, this is probably the only thing a VB is good for. I placed a beer-trap near the last remaining leaf in a bed of broccoli stalks, and filled it with half a stubby.

In the past I've not only caught slugs this way, but everything from slaters to cockroaches. I'm hoping like any establishment that puts a free-beer sign out the front in the early evening, I'll attract the regular kind of clowns that probably should be eating instead of drinking. But in this case its the yeast they're attracted to - the rest of the beer just drowns them. Vegemite (with cloudy ammonia) can be used in much the same way. I would once have said that's the only thing Vegemite is good for - but in fact it's much harder to clean from the trap later, and thus I can conclude there is nothing Vegemite is good for.

The beer trap I have is purpose built - and had it been coloured red, it wouldn't look too out of place in a bonsai display. But let me tell you, a fancy roof is a must-have for a beer trap in any kind of weather, let alone this week's biblical flooding. If you'd like to open up your own establishment, I'd suggest you speak to these guys.