1 2 3 4 5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
I love my backyard. It's an L shaped crook that stretches around my house with raspberry bushes on one side of a footpath, roses on the other, a pear tree at the crook's corner, and a pine tree at the end of the foot path. At the beginning of the path is a raised deck made out of wood and painted blue with four pots backed up against the wall. The pots have thyme, garlic, and chives, with the final pot being empty but positioned to catch rain water draining from the roof. The entire place has an earthy smell and is surrounded by trees growing in the neighbor's yards. They obscure the view on all sides except one which allows privacy for the most part, depending on where you stand. Birds sing in the trees almost all day long. The pine tree has a rock dove nest and the birds will look fearfully out at anyone walking down the path. The wind rocks the leaves and sounds foreign wind chimes. The place is rarely silent. Sometimes I will set a lounge chair out on the deck and sit for hours. It is a private place, all my own, but sometimes something enters your private place unannounced and uninvited, an intruder upon my peace of mind and sanctity of place.
Plants are important to the place and important to the mind's peace. As humans we like to surround ourselves with beautiful things. Natural, beautiful things. But we also like to control these things. Plants are easy to control. They don't move around much and most are relatively easy to take care of. Take my chives:
They are the most important plant in the garden. More than the raspberries or the pears which are tasty, but not made by God to be perfect in every aspect of their being. They smell a bit like onions, more delicate with something slight that tingles the nose. When chewed they fill up the mouth with their vaporous flavor and the nose feels a bit numb. They can be put on top of anything: pasta, fish, steak, whatever. When I was younger I used them for hiding the smell of cigarettes or booze. Now, that I'm older I use dried chives as incense. Because they are perfect, they require prefect attention and they are the first and last things I check when leaving the backyard. There's no need to water, they are under where the hose is connected to the house and they catch the drip and keep water from standing on the porch. I check the soil, and trim any stalks that grow beyond the pot. I would do more, but chives do well enough on their own. So well, that they can be neglected for weeks, but I would never be so careless or irresponsible.
They're an easy plant to grow. There's no point in trying to hide that. They do well in shade or sun and grow year round unless there is a heavy snow. They don't get sick, and they can grow in any soil they're put it, except maybe beach sand. There's no soil turning and snails won't touch them. They do well in hot environments and in cold environments and in... anywhere. Indoors too. The only thing that really needs to be done is trimming and I eat everything I cut off. Every part of a chive plant is edible, stalks to roots. You can even eat the flower, which is a pink fluffy thing that resembles cotton candy on a stick from far away. I've seen purple flowers too, but they are a bit rarer.
They grow so well, I might be tempted to forget they're there, except I'm infatuated with them. They taste so good. Everyday I poke and prod them checking the soil and the color of the plant.
One day, I had gone to the chives to cut off a few stalks for some eggs. I have to bend down on my knees, but that isn't a problem and certainly wasn't on this day as I clipped the stalks. I wasn't aware of something being wrong until I got back into the kitchen, eggs already turning white on the skillet, cumin spice at the ready. I cut the stalks and realized that the stalks had white specks on them. Holding the chives under the light I saw these little bugs. They were tiny and white with dark eyes and little antennae that waved lazily and, for I observed them closely, six legs that they seemingly never use, because all they do all day long is sit in one spot drink my chives' blood and turning the stalks yellow. Aphids. Nasty little beasts with no brains to speak of. Filthy and evil they suck plant juice and spread disease. They are the bane of roses, and will murder young saplings. And these monsters were on my chives.
When I checked the pot, there must have been hundreds. They weren't moving, just sitting and sucking and making a mess of my beautiful chives. I killed them all, of course. Took my finger and ran it down every stalk. They squish easily, the slightest contact and they pop, and they don't even run away. They can be poked and prodded and pushed, but they won't move. When they were all gone, I was sure that there was no more problem. The threat to paradise had been vanquished.
But the next day there were twenty. Killed them off. The day after: forty. Forty, sixty, ten, a hundred and ten. They don't stop, not ever. Spraying isn't possible even if it would be amusing to see them fall of the plant plummeting to the ground like little white meteors, legs spinning as their little voices screamed leaving their pain trailing behind them until they hit the ground and withered and died. But, I'm not spraying my chives with anything. I'd just make myself sick.
Aphids themselves are mutant space beasts. They can reproduce both sexually and asexually and they can even be pregnant while they are unborn, so that once they are born they can give birth imminently. That is why there are now more aphids on my plant then there are people in the city. Miss one and they'll all come back with in days. Terrible hell spawned demons of the insect world. Monsters beyond human ken.
Insecticide is toxic. It seems foolish to say it but few people seem to know just how toxic. RAID, the famous house hold item, is one part neurotoxin, one part lice killer, and one part chrysanthemum extract. The extract alone is enough to kill a cockroach, but RAID employs the others as overkill. There is no chance of survival and no chance of developed immunity. The problem with it is that all the ingredients are toxic to humans too. Spray too much and you may find yourself with what looks like allergies. Spray yourself in the face and... well, you'll not be enjoying your weekend except maybe out of a hospital ward. That people will spray this stuff in their homes, even in their bedrooms and kitchens is amazing to me. So worried about insects, and yet not at all worried about chemicals around their food.
But it should be possible to get rid of them some other way. I am a human and humans are smart. Aphids are just insects and dumb. Very, very dumb. We make animals go extinct all the time, a few diminutive blood suckers shouldn't be a problem.
Snails, the other big problem in the garden, are rare these days. I had bought a product with a name like Snail-Be-Gone or Slug-O or something else like that.
"This'll killing any slug or snail," I was assured by the employee, a lanky fellow who had never grown out of that awkward teen phase where it's all knees and elbows. He then told me that the stuff was basically iron coated in sugar. The snails eat it and when the sugar is digested the remaining iron tears up their insides. And if they didn't eat it, it would fertilize the ground. A nasty way for the snails to go, but a clever use of snail biology by humans.
I bought two cans of the stuff and haven't seen a snail since.
Ladybugs eat aphids right? I had called the nursery up the street to ask about the famous aphid eaters. Festively pretty, they're useful as well as decorative.
"They're 8.99," the lady on the phone told me.
"Is that by the pound?" I asked. I could see my chives out the window. The stalks were a pallid yellow most unnatural.
"That's by the bag," she said as if I'm one of the dumbest people she has had to talk to that day. There was a pause and she repeats, "8.99. In season."
"What is it out of season?"
"We don't sell them out of season."
I don't like heading up to the plant nursery because it usually means I have screwed up big. The last time I went was when I nuked a rose bush with too much fertilizer. The place is small compared to others I have seen. This is only a small local branch. I talked to an employee for several minutes but don't buy anything.
"This is what you need," he said holding up a yellow and green spritzer bottle with a picture of a lightning bolt vivisecting a grub of some kind. "Kills on contact."
"Oh," I said taking the bottle from him and reading the ingredients. Acetone butane, butyric acid, methoprene. Delightful. "Is this stuff nontoxic?"
"Sure, got pets?"
"Got chives," I mutter. He doesn't catch this.
"Any questions?"
"How can it be nontoxic if it's got acetone in it?"
"What's acetone?"
I didn't answer. Instead I shrugged and thanked him for his time. I then went into the greenhouse where they keep things like venus flytraps and ditched the bottle on the counter, wondering who in their right mind would market something with acetone as nontoxic. It's a pesticide not a beauty product. Nontoxic my ass.
I buy a single bag of ladybugs. These murderous aphid eaters of justice are very active compared to their prey. They crawled around the bag looking for ways out and I chuckled thinking that with this many of them the aphids didn't stand a chance. I dumped them down onto the chives and amused myself for a few hours watching the aphids get eaten by the enormous beetles. The stupid bugs didn't even try to run away. I've heard them called ant cattle, but I'd never seen anything look that bovine other than actual cows.
The supposedly deadly aphid eating machines flew away after a few days and I found not fifty or sixty, or even a hundred aphids, but what looks like thousands, every inch of the chives were covered. The bastard ladybugs abandoned the fight. With the cavalry in retreat, I did the only thing I could think of, crush them all again. Thousands of aphids will leave hands black and smelling of rotting chive leaves, one of the foulest smells I think I've ever experienced. There is a boozy nastiness to the smell, an undercurrent as if the aphids had little stills in their collective guts.
The ants in the bathroom don't bother me as much. I watched a steady stream of them as I scrape my hands raw trying to get the aphid gunk off of them. The ants typically nose through the medicine cabinet, inspect the toothpaste, and finally disappear behind the mirror. They carry their own smell, one that I know even though the rotten vapors of the aphids interfered my sense of smell. The ants have a dry, acidic smell. It's the smell of formic acid. They didn't seem too interested in the drain which is now smelling strongly of plant matter. I imagine the smell to be exactly what you would expect from a paper mill, if all that paper were rotting.
No spray, no ladybugs. As I ponder the problem late one night, watching moths and lacewings knock themselves unconscious on the porch light, I wondered why the lacewings aren't eating the blasted things. They're supposed to eat aphids too, and there are enough of them killing themselves on the light to take out millions of aphids. It seems Mother Nature has abandoned me.
How do you kill aphids with out poison or insects? I chopped the stalks to ground level and flooded the plant. The aphids floated to the top and bobbed up and down until they sunk leaving little tiny bubbles. This seemed to have worked for about a week, but once the plant grew back to pot level, there were the aphids again. Burning accomplishes the same, except the chives grow back slower.
The best way seems to be cropping the plant down and filling the pot up with soil and drenching it in water. Smother and drown the bastards, and it did work, sort of. No aphids, tasty chives, and all was right with the world. But they came back after a few days.
"What is it you love about those things anyway?" my girlfriend asked as I leaned over the chives plucking aphids with a pair of tweezers one day in June. She was sitting in one of the deck chairs, reading ActiveX for Dummies of all things, and glancing over at me occasionally as I muttered to myself and tried to grab an aphid.
This was an attempt to keep my hands from smelling like rotting plants as killing them with my fingers had become so disgusting that I could no longer do it. My nose would rebel, and I could feel my body trying to decide whether it should retch. The smell would follow me into the house too and linger. The dogs wouldn't come near me after I'd been outside, and my girlfriend made the comment that she wouldn't either unless I found a better way to kill the things.
"They're tasty," I said. The one I was to grab skirted around the tweezers with ease, but this was only because my hands were clumsy and I kept prodding it up the stalk.
"Not the plant, the aphids," she said setting the book down on her lap and adjusting her sunglasses. "Sometimes I think you like fighting them."
"That's absurd," I said, mentally cursing the little tap dancer who was still avoiding the prongs. I wondered if I should buy some latex gloves. Maybe I should cover the plants in hot wax. That would show the little blitters.
"Come on, you could get rid of those things if you wanted to," she said.
"You try it," I said finally seizing the aphid by the head. It popped into a mess of tiny limbs and black goop. One doesn't smell so bad; it's fifty or sixty that do it.
"Did you try hot water?" she asked.
"What good will that do?" I asked.
"Kills them," she said drumming her fingers against her knees. "Just boil some water and pour it on the plant."
I straightened up, "But won't that hurt the plant?"
"It will grow back," she said. "Oh, don't give me that look. You chop it down to ground level once a week anyway."
A month or two later I am out in the yard and go to check the plants. And now, just by the base is a single aphid. When the nuclear holocaust comes there will only be two cockroaches left and a bazillion god damn aphids.
Fictional... mostly.
© 2007 D.B. Stevens
| 
