| Mike Pirtle: Rain begat bushes, that begat bugs ... |
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By: MIKE PIRTLE, Post Publisher
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Posted: Sunday, May 17, 2009 7:27 am
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Dagnabit, as Gandpa McCoy would say, these May’s showers, downpours, deluges and frog-stranglers are getting a bit tiresome.
Never mind the impact on scheduled outside events, (and thank goodness we don’t have outside high school graduations like some places), I’m getting tired of worrying about bugs and bushes.
I don’t like rain every hour and a half, bugs and bushes do.
They like it a lot. They love it. They would marry it and have its baby.
The rain promotes blitzkrieg growth by the bushes, defined for this purpose as flowers, shrubs, vines and trees, or anything that blooms, cast off seedpods or other organic matter like annoying silver maples.
All the blasted blossoms, sorry seeds, poisonous pollen and other plant products serve as just one big old giant smorgasbord for the bugs, making them happier than Stephen Lewis with a free lunch card at Chef Wang’s.
In addition to the slugs, ants and weird-looking roach-like critters that are bigger than a cockroach with a vast array of antennae eating dead plant stuff, another critter is eying us hungrily.
With all the rain since April Fool’s Day and generally warm temperatures, mosquitoes are manifesting themselves like something out of the Old Testament when Moses was trying to get the Israelites out of Egypt.
Walking across the front yard last week to get the mail, I noted more mosquitoes of unnatural size than I have ever seen outside of a South Carolina swamp. Each step produced a cloud of mosquitoes that looked like Japanese planes over Pearl Harbor.
Shoot, I scurried out to the mailbox and back because I was afraid if the pesky bloodsuckers got organized they had enough numbers to just fly away with me.
Health experts tell us we need to be sure to keep stagnant water off our property so the skeeters won’t have a place for their young to spawn or whatever they do. When it rains every darn day, I’m not sure how those of us who work are supposed to accomplish that.
I do try, but anything with a slight depression ends up holding water as the rains come down and the floods come up.
Water collects in the various fast-food and beer containers the apartment dwellers a block over constantly throw into my corner lot at the stop sign, in the trays under the missus’ outside plants, in the cat’s food bowl, in every depression in the lawn and even in some of the cast off and blown off tree leaves.
Who can keep up with all of it?
Especially when it’s always raining.
Thanks to the NRA I’m think of getting a flamethrower and just roasting or boiling in insect critter or larva out there.
Lots of people have also complained recently about ants.
They are like sand on the seashore.
Ants really freak people out by coming into their houses. People don’t like sharing their abodes with six-legged critters and think ants somehow indicate they are not clean and tidy.
Actually, ants are clean and tidy and probably prefer homes that are likewise.
While someone who leaves Krispy Kreme doughnuts around the house probably attracts more ants, when spring comes ants just go looking for homes and don’t care if it has a hot tub, a wine cooler or crown molding or if it features Elvis on velvet, ECW wresting figures and overflowing ashtrays.
Like humans, the ants are probably just looking for a dry place.
Undoubtedly, this year any home that offers shelter from the rain is a plus.
And, nobody has a house ants can’t get into.
But, they freak people out with their little snake parades across the floor.
Spraying ants doesn’t work well and spreads pesticides needlessly.
The best ways to get rid of ants are 1) adopt an anteater, 2) ant bait that allows the tiny critters to carry the poison back to their next for a big, final feast or 3) take your flamethrower and track them back to their nest, then go all Rambo on them.
To keep those big roach looking things away from your house, I’ve learned not to throw those helicopter-like maple seeds out of gutters and such onto the lawn. Those steroid bugs love to eat the rotting or even blooming seeds.
I don’t know if those things just die after the seeds are gone or if the missus’ cat just ate or tortured to death all of them.
They just disappeared.
Maybe they drowned.
With every piece of flora in the lawn growing like crazy, I’m sure something else will show up any day.
Anybody know where you can get a flamethrower refill? |
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