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Meet the beetles

The drought here briefly relented and it finally rained the day before my father-in-law climbed into a Winnebago and drove north to Canada for some catch-and-release fishing, just after we had hand-watered the most fragile of the seedlings in his renovated garden and begun experimenting with a crude irrigation system (gravity works in our favor) between the four long rows of greasy beans he's put in.

He didn't bother with a garden last year, mostly, tired of the deer and the rabbits and the woodchucks eating more than he did. Which is to say: Everything. But the truth seems to be that he likes the work, and he is not insensitive to the desires of his daughter and her husband to learn more about tilling the soil. Whether or not he embraces our long-term concerns — read: William Kunstler's The Long Emergency and Barbara Kingsolver's new Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — doesn't matter. He is, at least, sympathetic. And likes fresh vegetables.

And so he spent a lot of time this spring putting in a new fence, tall and sturdy enough to give his garden a fighting chance. Before he left he asked only that one of us check in on the beans in a few days to make sure the runners didn't jump their rows.

Now, a couple years back we put in an orchard, a bunch of skinny sticks planted 40 feet apart in the hope that they might grow into bearing trees. And then we didn't do much, or at least I didn't. In part this is because there wasn't much to do, in part this is because there was too much to do elsewhere. This year has been better. Most of them are flourishing (we lost one apple and replaced it; he added two chestnutts, and we'll expand again this fall), they've been mulched re-caged and otherwise attended to. The berries are less certain. The raspberries didn't make it to the end of the first year because we didn't pay attention to the mold on their leaves. The blackberries seem not to wish to grow, which is an odd thing for a plant that's little more than a barely trained weed. But the blueberry plants seem to be holding their own.

Anyway, our intention is clearly ahead of our attention.

But we really do not wish to fail this year, not after so much early effort, not when the beans look so promising and the banana peppers are already overwhelming our ability to find uses for them (they'll get frozen in a day or so), and we've finally discovered that the best thing to do with squash is to treat it as if it were tofu. Not when we wish to focus our energies on eating locally as much as possible.

And so we went to the garden only to find an orgy in progress, these black and red beetles perched two or three to a leaf in a fornicating frenzy. Susan stood in the field with her cell phone and called every good gardener whose number she had saved, looking for an organic solution to the problem. I worked around the asparagus, where they were congregating, mastering the art of squishing the little devils with both hands. Sometimes they fly away, sometimes they fall to the earth, and sometimes they leave their guts on the leaves they sought to eat and leave in laced ruin.

I am a pacifist. I do not take the killing of anything lightly. If I did not like the occasional prospect of barbeque so much, and have a niggling sense that we really are meant to eat meat, I'd probably give the stuff up.

And if all the beetles were doing was eating the asparagus, well past harvest stage, we might have come to a peaceful resolution. But they were in the beans. The greasy beans, a heirloom species my father-in-law has preserved from where he grew up down in Hazard County. Perhaps the only greasy beans left in the world, for all we know. And the were nibbling at a couple of our otherwise flourishing trees.

This, anyhow, was our introduction to the ravages of the Japanese beetle.

My father-in-law had already hung traps, which were teeming with the little devils. Some argue the traps attract beetles and make the infestation worse. Hard to say. We went back out the next day with a mini-prep that doesn't get used much in the kitchen and some soapy water. We squished all the beetles we could and dropped them in the water, then ran them through the miniprep — there's power out to the barn — and sprayed them back on the beans. (And, yes, we'll still use the miniprep to make olivatta. The bugs washed out. Really. Though, perhaps sauteed in butter...)

A rangy, weathered fellow in the aisles at Lowe's (Southern States was closed by the time we left the orchard with suggestions in hand) looked up and said, "Sevin." "No," I answered. "Why?" he said, clearly baffled, for we are accustomed to using the simplest and most labor-saving technologies available. "Because we're trying to grow things organically, and because there's an orchard across the field that needs bees. And Sevin kills bees." And, of course, it's real good at killing Japanese beetles. He walked away silently.

But we found some pyrethrum (which I've probably misspelled but if you know enough to care you probably know enough to laugh), which I think is a more or less organic solution (at least it's not Sevin), and which seems, mostly, to be working. Things were much improved two mornings back. We meant to go check this morning, but it's been raining about twelve hours solid, which is good for the crops and means we can go out to the fish hatchery and hunt blackberries this weekend. So we'll wait for it to dry out a bit, not because I mind walking out there instead of driving, but because we may need to apply another layer of spray.

And to the orchard, which we sprayed a couple days back with a copper confection said to keep molds and such off the leaves. One of the cherry trees has turned copper and yellow as if it were already Fall. The helpful gal at Southern States said she thought it might simply be shock (which would account for one of the forsythia in our front yard, too) from the drought and the sun. Or it's some kind of fungus. Either way, I won't be surprised if the tree doesn't make it, but we want to inoculate as much of the orchard as we can against whatever's got that tree in its grip.

Anyhow, that's why I haven't listened to much music these last few days, nor opened my mail. But the CD cabinet did finally get finished and dragged inside, just before the rains hit to celebrate July 4. There were no fireworks last night, and I am grateful for that, too.

Ordinarily I'd have glued the shelves in place before screwing them solidly. But this time I left the glue out. I can pull every other shelf and turn it into a bookcase for paperbacks if this MP3 thing really works out.

Posted by grant on July 5, 2007 9:18 AM | Permalink

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