Monday, September 03, 2007, 22:24
Disaster in the Pumpkins
There I was. Minding my own business. Taking Charlie for a walk around the hayfield just before sunset Sunday evening.
And it was a lovely evening, too. Hot during the day. But cooler after the sun moved farther west in the sky. There was a haze on the horizon, but overall, the sky was fairly clear. The red sun was hanging low in the sky.
I came around the east side of the hayfield and headed toward the pumpkin patch. As I started to walk past the south end of the patch, I glanced toward one of the pumpkins -- and stopped short.
The orange pumpkin was black with big ugly-looking squash bugs. The same kind of bugs that killed off my watermelon and muskmelon a few weeks ago. The adult bugs are about the size of my thumbnail.
I looked at the other pumpkins. They were all supposed to be Big Max pumpkins and Atlantic Giants, but they crossed with the field pumpkins in the other garden and the Cinderella pumpkins. We had pumpkins of all shapes and sizes.
And every last one of them was black and crawling with squash bugs.
Randy was at a tractor pull, so I was on my own for trying to get rid of some of the bugs.
Dish soap
I went to the house and got a spray bottle and some soap. I figured detergent was better than trying to soak the whole patch with pesticide. Better for the environment. Better for me.
I should have gotten the camera, too, to take pictures of the things. But to tell you the truth, I was so upset about the squash bugs ruining all of Randy's pumpkins that pictures were the last thing on my mind.
I got the spray bottle and the soap and went to work. The adult bugs didn't die off right away from the detergent spray, but the nymphs were practically killed on contact.
I sprayed. And sprayed. And sprayed. And sprayed some more. And all the while I was wading through shoulder high pigweed that had taken over parts of the patch. I am allergic to pigweed. Not quite as allergic as I am to grass pollen and ragweed, but at this point, my system doesn't really care. It's an allergen -- and I'm going to react to it.
Spectators
At one point while I was spraying, I looked up and 50 feet away in the hayfield was a doe and her two fawns.
As I moved around the pumpkin patch, the doe would occasionally raise her head to watch me. But she was not particularly bothered by my presence, and as I worked to spray all of the pumpkins, she and her fawns grazed their way across the hayfield.
The evening was cool. The grass has grown a bit from the rain we got in August. And the deer apparently didn't have a care in the world. Even though I was disgusted by all of the squash bugs, I was glad that the deer and her children felt safe enough to continue browsing their way across our field.
When I was finally finished spraying the pumpkins, it was almost dark.
It was nearly midnight by the time Randy got home from the tractor pull. I told him the bad news about his pumpkins, and right away Monday morning, Labor Day, he went outside to survey the damage.
Bright light of day
In the light of day, Randy could see that although there weren't too many squash bugs right on the pumpkins, the leaves and the vines and the ground were alive with them. Most of the vines had been sucked dry and killed off, and in places we could see the black withered remains of the pumpkin leaves.
The first thing my husband did was hook up the hose and attach a little sprayer apparatus we have with a bottle attached to it to spray the pumpkin patch again with detergent.
When Randy was finished spraying, he began picking the pumpkins that might be all right and ripe enough to hold on until October. And he began pulling the vines and the weeds and putting them in a pile. A couple of dozen pumpkins were already ruined with holes chewed in them or were turning soft and mushy already.
After I fed the horses, I went out and started to help him pick pumpkins. All together, we found maybe a dozen that might be all right.
More problems
When we finished picking the pumpkins, I decided I had better check the field pumpkins, Cinderella pumpkins, the little ornamental pumpkins and my squash in the other garden.
And that's when I made another gruesome discovery.
The squash bugs had invaded the other garden as well.
I walked around the end of the garden on my way to the barn for the spray bottle and soap and glanced at my squash. They, too, were infested with bugs.
You might know it. I haven't had a good squash crop in a few years. This year, the squash were doing the best of everything in the garden. They are at the bottom of the hill, and what little rain we got this summer came in brief periods of torrential rainfall. The rain would run off the hill and right down into the squash patch.
But now my squash have been invaded with squash bugs too.
Once again
Randy helped me get the hose down to the garden. I attached the spray bottle to it and went to work with more detergent on the field pumpkins, the few Cinderella pumpkins that are there, the little fluted ornamental pumpkins (that are so cute and were doing so well) and the squash.
We decided we will leave the squash to let the fruit ripen and will spray them with detergent every few days to keep the bugs at bay.
Burn pile
As for the other pumpkin patch, after Randy made a pile out of the vines and the weeds, he attempted to burn it Monday afternoon. The stuff was really too green to burn well, but it smoldered for a while, and maybe the smoldering killed off more of the squash bugs.
Later this fall, Randy is going to take the disk and the plow and turn over the pumpkin patch. When we clear off the rest of the garden, he is going to turn that over, too. Usually we wait until spring to turn over the garden, but under the circumstances, we don't want to leave a good place for the squash bugs to spend the winter.
Other bugs
This has been a good year for crickets and grasshoppers, too. But at least the crickets and grasshoppers don't destroy the pumpkins, watermelon, muskmelon and squash.
Randy did some research on squash bugs and learned that they have five stages of development
over a summer season. We are really going to have to keep an eye on the squash and pumpkins next year to see if we can't keep the bugs out of the garden.
Randy says he is going to rotate the crop and put something else in the pumpkin patch next year although I don't know what that will be. It can't be squash or watermelon or muskmelon. I already know for sure that the squash bugs like those just as well.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Sunday, September 02, 2007, 04:49
Thinking Outside the Box
My husband thinks I am brilliant.
I don't necessarily think I *am* all that brilliant.
Then again, who am I to argue with him?
It all started Saturday morning while he was getting ready to mow the cemetery. As he was looking over the WeedEater, it came to his attention that the gas line was junk.
This was exactly what had happened to the old WeedEater still down in the lean-to by the barn. When the gas line had gone to pieces on it a few years ago, he had looked everywhere for gas line tubing small enough to fit. None of the hardware stores or other parts places in the area had anything that would work. Which is why we bought a new one.
Randy had held onto the old one in case he needed it for some type of parts. Except for the gas line, of course.
And then, Saturday morning, the gas line on the "new" WeedEater went to pieces -- just as he was getting ready to mow the cemetery. As I'm sure everyone realizes, a cemetery is precisely the place where a string trimmer is needed most. All of those headstones, you know. Not to mention a few bushes and trees.
Pick Me!
As my husband searched around the basement, looking for something that might possibly work (all the while knowing that he didn't have anything that could remotely be close to being small enough) and while I trailed around behind him, some little something in the back of my brain was jumping up and down and waving its arms. "Pick me!" the something said. "I can do it! I know I can! Pick me!"
"There's got to be something that will work," I said. "I can just sense it. It is as if something is jumping up and down in the back of my brain, waving its arms, saying 'Pick me!' But I can't quite think what it is."
All at once, the word "medical" popped into my head. And then "pharmaceutical."
"The word 'medical' just popped into my head," I said.
Randy looked at me as if I had lost my mind. He went back outside to fiddle around with the WeedEater some more.
I went upstairs and into the bedroom. When Winifred was so sick after her tooth surgery last spring and we needed to give her subcutaneous fluids with an IV line, I had hung the whole apparatus in my closet to keep the tubing looped around a hanger so it wouldn't get any kinks in it. I looked at the tubing. It just might work. Not that particular tubing. But I was pretty sure I knew where there was more.
Spare parts
I went to the shelving unit in the corner of the kitchen that my dad had built many years ago. I rummaged around, and sure enough, there it was. When my beloved Tiger Paw Thompson was so sick with kidney failure, I had to give him subcutaneous fluid every day. When I had gone through a couple of bags of Lactated Ringers fluid, I would get a new IV line. I kept the old ones as "backups" in case I ever needed them.
I took one of the tubes outside. It was a little smaller than the gas line, but it might work.
"I think I found your gas line," I said to Randy.
"Oh? What's that?" he said.
"IV tubing."
"IV tubing?"
"Yes. I've got some old ones from before Tiger Paw Thompson died."
Tiger Paw has been gone for almost three years, and whenever I think of him, I still feel like crying. Well, that's not quite right. When I think of him, I *do* cry. (I'm crying right now as I write this, in fact.)
"Well," Randy said. "I don't know. IV tubing might work."
He snipped off a length of the tubing. And sure enough. It fit.
A little while later, he had fixed the WeedEater.
"You are brilliant," he said. "Just brilliant. Who would have figured IV tubing would fit?"
Randy used the tubing to fix the old WeedEater, too, but it had sat around for too long without being run and did not want to start.
"I might as well take this, too, when I go," he said, putting the old WeedEater in the back of the truck. "It's really nothing but trash now."
"If you want to go to the dump -- er, collection station -- and go to town to buy some gas, by the time you come back, I will have finished hauling water for the horses and hauling manure to the hayfield, and then I'll help you," I said.
And -- They're Off and Running!
By early afternoon, we were at the cemetery mowing.
What a job.
Randy used the riding mower and I started around with the push mower to do some of the trimming. I discovered that the headstones weren't bad at all. I could actually get right up to them with the mower. It's all the doo-dads people have put out on the cemetery that cause problems. Particularly the sprays of plastic flowers that have been stuck in the ground by the stones.
I lost count of the number of these little items that I pulled up, set aside, mowed around the stones, and then put the flowers back.
And then there's the little rope chain fence around the cemetery. It was a gift to the church "because it will look nice." Of course it looks nice. But there are dozens of white posts that have to be trimmed around. I could get some of them with the mower, but Randy was going to have finish up with the WeedEater. Same thing with about half of the headstones. (Personally, I think it should be a rule that headstones are never put any closer together than the width of a lawn mower.)
It's not that I don't want to use the WeedEater, by the way. It's just that the thing is so long and I have to hold it at such an angle, that after a short while, my shoulders start to ache. Randy is taller, and the WeedEater fits him much better. When I use the WeedEater at home, I do it in small increments. Mow a section. Trim. Mow a section. Trim. And so forth.
By the time I got to the front and started to mow the part of the ditch next to the highway that Randy couldn't get with the riding mower, I decided we should either: A. -- Let the county highway department mow the right-of-way and forget about mowing it ourselves (and who cares that it is right in front of the church?) Or B. -- Plant it to prairie grasses and let it go back to the way the prairie looked around here a couple of hundred years ago.
It was a struggle, but I finally made it through mowing the ditch. I shut the mower off, and as Randy finished up the weed whacking, I got a broom from downstairs and swept off both sidewalks.
When we were completely finished, we had been at it, both of us going flat out, for three and a half hours. And it was hot Saturday. Temperature in the 80s and kind of humid.
I was never so glad to be finished with a job.
More of the Same
After we arrived home, I rested my back for a while on the heating pad. Then we went out and finished mowing the rest of our own lawn. We had started Friday evening and had gotten about halfway through.
I hope I'm done mowing for the weekend now. But, depending on how much rain we get, or if we get any rain at all, we could end up doing the same thing next weekend.
Oh, well. At least I know the exercise is good for me. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
