The killing takes a gentle touch, else the Japanese beetles take wing and land on some other plant out of sight. Mostly they tumble earthward like ballbearings in a pachinko machine, and so they are easily brushed into a bucket with two inches of water. They don't die there -- actually, they cling to each other -- but the water keeps their wings from working, which makes it possible to carry them up from the orchard, up from the garden, and in to the barn where the chickens we set loose because they were too tough to eat and too old to justify feeding and too much trouble to kill in all this heat, they eat 'em up yum.
The younger chickens, the ones still in cages, haven't learned the trick of eating them yet, and so I don't waste the effort.
Bean beetle grubs, the other prey of the moment, are little furry yellow things that squish easily enough when you turn over a half-eaten leaf and actually find one, but their yellow guts are so strong as to remain in the fabric of your jeans, even after washing, because you have to rub them off somewhere, right?
This is a comparatively new world to me. I'm just learning, in bits and pieces. I'm going to type some, because doing so is still soothing, but mostly I have some questions to ask and I figure it's a hot Sunday afternoon maybe some folks here would like to come out of the sun and talk about making food come from home, instead of...well, wherever Kroger gets it these days.
Most days this July I start with the bucket of water, chasing the Japanese beetles off the trees. Pears, which seem mostly impervious, cherries, and apples. None of them old enough to bear fruit, though we might have gotten some this year but for one last frost. The honey crisp apples we planted last fall aren't doing too well, probably because the bugs like young and weak trees, but possibly because they grow up in Michigan and we planted them down in Kentucky. One of them is dead, the other three are pretty scraggly. They'll probably do better next year, as the rest of the orchard -- the survivors, anyhow, and we haven't lost but two or three in four years -- looked pretty rough the first summer, too.
All told we probably have, I dunno (I should keep a journal, a record, but I don't; maybe next year) thirty trees?
Anyhow. Today I finally made time to spray them with copper, which the books say will help retard what I think is rust, a mold on the leaves. I should have done this weeks ago, but this life of creative unemployment doesn't juggle easily with uncertain weather.
Back up to the garden, where the Japanese beetles are cavorting in our beans. Often they can be found in an unholy embrace, a kind of orgy, which really pisses me off because they're having a lot more fun with our beans under the midday sun than I am, but it also makes it easier while they're distracted to knock them to their eventual demise.
I spent some time around the animal rights folks as a teenager, and I have troubled some over killing these bugs and over maybe torturing them by dumping them in the water, and by feeding them to the chickens. But I got over it.
If I were a Christian, I would accept the presence of pests as a kind of tithe, and even not as a Christian I would accept mother nature taking ten percent of what we plant simply because the whole notion of rows and planting and all that isn't exactly natural. Fifteen percent, maybe, long as she doesn't act like Guido the Lump about it. We have tried mostly to plant native species (much of the orchard came from an organic place down in Tennessee, and they've done better for us than the plants we bought from the fancy color catalogues), but the fornicating Japanese beetles are hardly native, and so finding something like a natural solution to them to their infestation is a mess.
We did, at last, decide the traps brought more around than not, although this has been an odd year full of weather, and may not validate that hypothesis. We've also sprayed everything with peppermint soap (available at your health food store), on the advice of an extension agent who went to grad school with my brother-in-law. The theory (and research, actually) is that it blocks the beetles' pheremones and discourages them from landing on those plants. Maybe.
I've also sprayed with neem oil to try to cut the little yellow hellion grubs down to size, because getting down on my knees at my age, after all those years being the worst player on the basketball court, isn't all that much fun. Maybe that works, maybe it helps. It feels like I'm doing something that's less effort than turning over every new leaf.
The garden itself doubled over the winter to 10,000 square feet. This is because the bloody deer kept eating the blackberry vines down to the soil, and so we had to add fence around them and the plum trees. It's not a business for us; it's exercise, it's good food, it's an experiment, it's a hedge against a world I no longer have any faith in. It's on my father-in-law's land, and it's his project, my wife and I have just slowly insisted that we'd help and we'd prefer to do things organic. Last year I think he slipped a little sevin around when we weren't looking, and we still use some regular fertilizer gently because the soil sucks and as much as we work to amend it, we still mean to eat out of this garden.
And therein lies the rub, the question I'm ambling toward while I wait for the tomatoes to ripen and Sarah Palin to do something more interesting and Congress to do its job, or admit that it's job isn't what we think it is and move on.
We mean to take leaves and such from some of the lawn services around town, and spread them over the garden once we've turned everything over this fall. And I've talked to everybody we know who has horses or llamas or whatever else might be useful about collecting their manure, but this isn't a particularly rural county what with the university and all, and there's not nearly as much manure here as we'd like. So it's leaves, and they work well, or well enough. But at the same time I keep reading that the layer of leaves we propose to compost is nothing more than a breeding ground for next year's beetles and grubs. So...what to do, what to do?
And the headline: We do this for a hobby, to eat well. But doing it, coming to this in my middle years (to be charitable), I begin to understand why any kind of commercial operation would want to use pesticides. Would want to make it easier. It took me the better part of three hours to do this, to pick beetles from five (well, six) rows of greasy beans, and the rest. To spray fish fertilizer where it was needed, too. Or where I thought it was needed, pending tonight's rain. I don't mind the time, but if we were trying to scrape a living from this, it sure would be hard to pencil out the time and the effort into something like a living wage.
That's all. Talk amongst yourselves, if'n you like.