The Pests Come Out At Night

By night, my backyard is the epitome of a gardener's nightmare... earwigs covering all available surfaces of the withering and helpless zucchini seedlings... silvery slug trails as thick as chainmail are draped over the earth's chest.  It may be a pest's paradise out there for now, but plants are one of my greatest loves, and stubbornness is perhaps my greatest fault... I WILL be victorious.

 Taking a good picture of the mesh-like network of slug trails is difficult... but here you can still see lots of slime sparkles!

And so, I need a new plan for the bugs.  After that midnight foray into the garden with a flashlight, I am shocked to see exactly what my seedlings are up against, and not so surprised that any new nasturtium/pea seedlings in the ground disappear in a day or two (seedlings in pots seem to do fine). As an emergency action tonight I'm setting up barriers by cutting the bottoms out of plastic cups and then pressing them into the soil around each seedling.

I'll also try my grandpa's newspaper method... you lightly roll up newspaper into a long log and then put a rubber band around the middle, wet it and set it outside at dark... by morning earwigs will have crawled inside to hide for the day, and you can just throw the newspaper in the trash.

The beer trap is doing fantastic, there is about a centimeter's thickness of insect bodies at the bottom, primarily pincher bugs.  It seems that the longer I leave it there, the more enticing it becomes to the bugs, so I'll leave it a bit longer.  It is, um, a little too gross to photograph.