I have had earwigs eating my balcony garden crops, so I decided to try a solution I found online: add 50/50 soy sauce and oil to a container and leave it overnight. It was filled with earwigs the next morning! So I am setting up another trap with an empty tofu dessert container.
That being said, earwigs aren’t universally bad. They help decompose plant material in a compost pile. However on my balcony, they were doing more harm than good. The ladybugs can stay :P
Are we making an insect trap or just a killer dipping sauce?
Fish sauce and oil is really all you need. Fish sauce really brings them in. Cleaning the traps is gross. Don’t waste the soy if you don’t have to.
Any particular kind of oil? Vegetable?
It doesn’t really matter. The oil just makes it hard for them to swim and suffocates them, the fish sauce is an irresistible lure. I use a cottage cheese container with some holes small holes in the lid that I bury in the corner of the garden bed.