The beauty of destruction
Okay, there is no beauty in destruction. Most of the time. Unless you’re destroying something ugly such as an infestation of harlequin bugs. Which is exactly what we did this week. And it felt good.
Harlequin bugs, for their pretty name, are neither pretty nor funny. We’d never encountered them before. But then, we’d never grown brassicae before. Now, we’ve got broccoli and winter cabbage, and, as it turned out, we’ve also got harlequin bugs. Lots of them.
Irina: I had an infestation of black-and-red bugs in my room when I was about fifteen. I was alone in the house and when I saw the thousands of insects crawling all over the window, the curtains and the floor I flipped out and started hitting them with my dad’s hammer.
Cat: Mum! They’re harmless.
Irina: There were thousands. I wasn’t thinking about harmless at all.
Unlike black-and-red bugs, harlequin bugs are far from harmless for members of the cabbage family. They suck out the life of the plants, literally, at pretty much every stage of their life.
And because we ignored them at the start, a few weeks later the bugs were swarming over the poor broccoli. Luckily, we had pesticides.
As a rule, we’re not big fans of things ending in -cide. Using them is a hassle of protective clothing, masks, and goggles, it’s bad for the environment, and anyway it’s not like we’re real farmers, so why bother. Let nature go its way, we thought.
That was before Cris had enough of having to throw away 90% of the quinces our two trees produce because they were getting eaten from the inside out.
A short research and a visit to the agri pharmacy later, he returned home with an insecticide and the knowledge that certain insects lay their eggs in the quinces while they are still a flower and the larvae then hatched and ate their way out of the growing fruit.
Nature is marvelous and all that but Cris wanted quinces, so he sprayed the trees. He also sprayed all the other fruit trees to prevent similar insect behaviour towards them. More spraying was made necessary when they newly acquired peach sapling turned out to be infected with leaf curl.
A lot of spraying later the peach is looking healthy and we have all learned something new about pest control. The quinces are young so we don’t know how they will turn out but judging by the effect the same pesticide had on the harlequin bugs, they should be fine.
This is how the broccoli looked after bug destruction was administered by Irina over the weekend.
You do not want to see what it looked like before destruction was administered. Anyway, you can’t because they’re all dead.
Cat: I saw one crawling up the next one an hour ago.
Irina: WHAT?
Cris: Don’t worry, it’ll die, too.
We’ve developed a certain appreciation for the chemicals industry lately. Sure, it’s much easier and organic to spray plants with soap water or ash water, or to squash the bugs with your own hands but these are, alas, not the most effective or efficient methods of pest control. Not to mention you can’t stop flies from laying their eggs in quince flowers or the leaf curl fungus from taking advantage of a wet spring.
Sometimes easy and organic is not good enough, and anyway these pesticides are made to be used on things we eat, so they can’t be actually harmful in the dosage prescribed, right? Unless you overdo it, which we’re definitely not doing. We are, after all, going to eat the stuff.
That said, we are all in favour of organic means of pest control. They’re a lot cheaper, easy to use and non-toxic, for the most part. As long as they work. Soapy water decidedly did not. Manual and pedal bug-squashing did work but nowhere near the scale necessary.
Cat: Mum said she’d seen something about garlic spray.
Cris: And how often would you have to use it?
This is a question that remains open, to be closed after the next sighting of a harlequin bug in the vicinity of the broccoli or the cabbages. Until then, we’re the Motherbitches Guy.