#6 - Garden Insects

A week ago I was crawling around in my garden weeding the onions and breaking up clods of dirt with my hands. It was a hot day. Some of the first deer flies were out, plaguing me in their endearing manner, and I was getting a bit sweaty. Quite sweaty actually. And sweat and dirt make mud.

As I swatted at those nasty little buggers, I accumulated streaks of mud all over me, mostly on my bare back. Deer flies are cowards; they usually go for your back or the back of your head where you can't see them. Just the same, I was not going to let them drive me out of my own garden. Things got worse for a while; I became a sweaty, mud-streaked killer, lashing out at nearly everything that zipped around me. Not only were the onions suffering in the fray, but the action was straying into my newly hoed potato patch. It wasn't pretty.

Gradually however, this agricultural exercise lost some of its feverishness as the battle settled down to a rhythmic bite - slap, bite - slap routine. Perhaps it was my protective layer of mud, I don't know, but at least the situation was under control.

I've seen times when things weren't so under control, like late on a steamy, summer evening when I've tried to weed just one more row before it gets too dark to see, and the mosquitoes are so thick around me that it feels almost as though I'm under water, and I'm even inhaling them. If I survive to the end of the row, I run bellowing nonsense for the barn, strewing rake, hoe and cultivator across the lawn, sacrificed in the heat of battle, as I go.

In general, I think, we try not to let the bugs get the upper hand, but it's a hard business, fraught with pain and suffering, punctuated by stabs of panic. The garden can take on a surrealistic appearance: steel drums containing smudge fires flickering around the perimeter and alien-looking creatures with greatly enlarged heads of dark, green netting ambling about snorting white puffs with their dust guns. An ugly business, this, fighting off insects in the garden.