WHY SNAILS ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT
I'm not much of a gardener, but I enjoy having a garden. My father was a big gardener and I remember planting a garden in the backyard when I was a kid. Now I mostly grow a wide variety of weeds. This year I tried to make gardening easier. I planted potatoes, carrots and pumpkins. To make the garden easy to weed I made wide rows that I can easily weed with my electric tiller. This was going to be my best garden ever.
Apparently word got out because the snails moved in. Yesterday I checked on the garden and one of the potato plants was eaten to the ground and there were snails everywhere. The snails come out at night. You can tell because they leave little trails all over the sidewalk and patio. I couldn't poison them because it ruins the vegetables, so I jumped on the web and found out that you can kill them with a container of beer. They crawl into the beer, get drunk, and die. Since I've never had a beer it's probably the same thing that would happen to me.
Now I had to decide where I was going to get some beer. I've never purchased beer before and doing so in Utah can be problematic if you want to stay in good standing with the local religion. I decided to run over to the grocery store early in the morning where I could buy my snail killer and slip out unnoticed.
I got up early this morning and went to the store. After buying a few groceries I found the beer isle and grabbed a box of beer. At the store the only check out lines that were open were the self-checkout lines. There were a bunch of people around but I didn't know any of them so I was good to go. I scanned all of the grocery items first and saved the beer for last. I scanned it and the register beeped and said it couldn't scan the beer. I stood there puzzled for a moment when the attendant overseeing the self-checkout shouted at the top of her voice "Hey, you can't buy beer until 7:01, you'll have to wait a few minutes". Everyone was staring at me and it was getting a little awkward.
Finally 7:01 came around and I was able to complete my purchase. Now to make my get-away. As I exited the store I met someone I knew. I teach the 17 year old Sunday School class at church and who did I meet? You guessed it, a member of the Sunday School presidency. Since I had scanned the beer last it was sitting right on top of the grocery cart. He glanced at the beer, looked up and me and said "Don't worry, I've got your back". I tried to explain that the beer was for killing slugs in my garden and quickly told the story about how I couldn't buy it until 7:01am. He was polite, but I'm sure he didn't believe me. So if anyone wants to do something on Sunday I'm pretty sure I'm going to have some free time on my hands.
Then it dawned on me. I now realized why snails come out at night. They like beer, and can buy it during the daytime, but they can't buy beer in Draper until 7:01am -- so they are out at night looking for a cold brew.
07/01/2015 16:05PM UPDATE: Just let the dog out back to do his business. Didn't worry about the beer in the garden because our garden has a fence around it. A few minutes later I looked out back to see the dog drinking the beer out of the snail traps. I ran out back and called him and he had found a spot in the fence where he could squeeze and get into the garden. Now I'm working on blocking his access and we've enrolled him in a 12-step program.
