Poison in pink

Ah, spring. The great awakening of nature, flowering time, days of beauty. Alas, it’s not only the beautiful sides of nature that awaken in spring. Lice, snails and flea-like creatures swarm on fresh green sprouts to feast. Unless something stops them.

Every single year, our daffodils fall prey to a small black bug variety that looks like a pumped-up flea and that, if left alone, sucks and eats the life out of the flowers. Lice prefer chrysanthemums. It’s pest time in the garden.

Last year, we tried both the soap water classic and a store-bought concoction that promised quick positive results by creating, the label said, a polymer film over the leaves and petals, making it impossible for the pests to feed. Yeah, right.

This year, we experimented with tried and tested (by other gardeners), homemade means of pest extermination. Here’s what we found.

#1 The funny YouTube guy’s onion and cayenne pepper spray.

This concoction features an onion, some garlic, some cayenne pepper and water. Chop, stir, and let sit for a night. Does it work? Yes. The problem is that for our needs it was too much of a hassle to make, meaning it took to long and there was a delay between preparation and use. It would work great for house plants, however.

#2 Soap water with tobacco extras.

Emboldened by the success of tobacco infusion as processionary caterpillar killer, we decided to give it a try with the young chrysanthemums that had become victims of an unknown enemy, possibly snails — in any case something that grazed on the young shoots.

We made the usual soap water and added the tobacco infusion in it. Did it work? Yes, but it too involved a delay between preparation and use that was unwelcome. Those tender shoots had to be sprayed often and generously.

#3 The thing that worked.

The internet is full of wisdom if you know where to look and we looked at gardening blogs and Telegram channels. Which is where we discovered the magic of potassium permanganate.

This modest but pretty crystal can disinfect the soil, lower its acidity, and kill pathogens—and pests. And it does not need time to release its goodies. All you need to do is dissolve half a teaspoon in a litre of water and then dilute the resulting deep violet liquid with as much water as to get a pale pink colour. Fill the sprayer, add a glob of soap, shake a bit, and start spraying.

This is exactly what we did when the daffodil killers emerged from the ground, just as we were hoping they had somehow died of natural causes. They hadn’t. They were just a bit late to the feast this year. But this time, we were ready for them.

Last year, the clumps in the background barely made a few flowers. This year, well, you can see for yourself. It’s still work, spraying them all and then spraying them again next day and then the day after.

Still, it’s less work than we had to do last year when spraying had to be done several times a day because those monsters demonstrated complete disregard for soap water and didn’t even notice the store-bought, guaranteed-effect polymer stuff at all.

The mixture also works on the lice that tried to colonise the chrysanthemum shoots. They do come back, yes, but not immediately and not in the same great numbers because the Pink Lady kills them off well and truly good. Yep. That’s what we’re calling the soap water+permanganate mixture. It’s pink, it’s pretty, and it works. As a bonus, it also promotes healthy growth.

We had almost written the Yellow Spider off after the grazer, whatever it was, started on it. Notice the clump of green around the bottom dry stalk. Those are shoots the poor flower kept putting out to compensate for those that got eaten.

The shoots in the upper half of the photo are the result of regular, incessant application of the Pink Lady. The grazer’s gone and so are the lice that tried to make one of our favourite chrysanthemums its diner. The moral of this story of near-death and pain: there is always a way, you just have to keep looking till you find it. This is how wisdom is acquired.

P.S. We know about industrial pesticides. We’ve decided against them for reasons of safe disposal of whatever remains of them after use (too much hassle) and also for reasons of suspicion that they would work on the flowers about as well as they worked on the broccoli’s nemesis, the harlequin bug, last year. Which was not really well at all.