Notes from Maine - 2024/05/26
The weather is beautiful here. It already feels like summer outside. The lilacs are in full bloom and the first iris has already opened. If I weren’t disgusted with gardening, this would be a great year to get an early jump on all the delicate plants that normally wait until June.
I suspect that this house was thoroughly poisoned when I bought it. There were a million lilies down the length of the house for the first couple years. When I was new to this house, a friend stopped by one time and asked what I was using on them.
“Using on them?”
“To keep the Lily Leaf Beetles at bay?”
The threat of Lily Leaf Beetles was news to me. I thought that maybe my lilies (inherited from the last owners of the house) were resistant or something. After a couple of years, the lilies were ruined. As soon as the first lily plants begin to come up, red beetles appear like magic and begin their feast. I have similar infestations of squash bugs and tomato horn worms. In the first few years that I lived here, I could easily grown enough tomatoes to feed an army. Now I get as many giant caterpillars as I do mature tomatoes. For every crop, there’s a pest.
I’ve tried a few of the “natural” solutions. Last year, I inspected the tomato plants every day, combing over each leaf and stem and keeping a tally of how many horn worms I stomped. The easy answer is pesticides, I suppose. If I’m going to go to all that effort, and then apply pesticides, I fail to see the benefit of gardening. The tomatoes at the store are equally as poisonous.
Maybe I’ll do zinnias again. They’re pretty until the Japanese beetles show up to ravage them.
The horses have been enjoying the weather as well. Do you ever start to write something, realize that it’s a lie in the middle of writing it, but finish the thought anyway? The horses absolutely don’t care for the weather, although they should. The temperatures are moderate, there aren’t that many bugs yet, a decent breeze, and they can stay out all day and night. They don’t want to stay out, but they can. Every time I go outside, they clamor to come into the barn. When I take the hose to rinse and fill their outside buckets, they try to squeeze past me to get inside. I’ll let them come in for a few hours in the afternoon. Earl doesn’t like to sleep outside, and sleeping is one of the things he does best. Give him a cellphone, and he would be indistinguishable from a teenager.
Mom just yelled at me, pointed, gave me a disgusted look, and left. I’m out of carrots. She likes to be the Carrot Lady for the horses and nobody put carrots on the list. My sister just left to go to the store. I suggested that we could call her and ask her to get carrots, but she’s only going to the local store and carrots are a Costco item. At Costco you can get a bag of carrots that’s roughly the size of a WW2 duffel bag for a dollar. The cost drops amazingly when you increase the quantity and size of the carrots. I think you can get a huge sack of enormous carrots for the same price that you would spend on a tiny bag of baby carrots. It’s the same with alfalfa cubes. I can buy a fifty pound (22 kg) bag of alfalfa cubes for cheaper than a tiny bag someone might get for their guinea pig.
I better make myself scarce before I get yelled at again (by the horses or by Mom).
