Here's what's going on: For the past month I've been going online five days a week, instead of four, to produce linky and up-to-date guest posts for an e-friend's blog, while also ghostwriting historical fiction. It's been fun but time-consuming, especially as I've tried to read as many as possible of yourall's blogs, tweets, and articles too. I still have a six-inch stack of printed manuscripts plus about fifty book reviews actually uploaded into Word files on this computer; I've not made the time to transfer those book reviews to this web site yet.
In theory the laptop I use to work online (which was formerly owned by Grandma Bonnie Peters, and thinks its name is "bonnie") lives in town; at home I use my beloved modem-free desktop (which thinks its name is "Office of Tax and Revenue"), and as a backup I use the laptop some readers may remember as the Sickly Snail (which thinks its name is "Owner"). In practice, the desktop's in the shop and I've been burning out this laptop, hauling it home and using it at night. And a good part of my own personal memory--like the accounting information I've stopped posting online, as stipulated in a hack writing contract--is on the desktop computer.
Additionally, about a day after I posted thankfully that so far the insect population crash had at least meant a mosquito-free spring, two things coincided: raspberries and cherries began to ripen (distracting my cardinals from eating insects), and this year's mosquitoes hatched into an almost waspless world.
Mosquitoes that are native to the Blue Ridge Mountains will bite any other living creature before they bite me, so I used to recognize them only as things that annoyed my mother.
Asian Tiger mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus (they have tiny bright black-and-white stripes that glitter faintly in shade), are here to equalize the situation. They ignore everyone else and try to bite me first.
You can substantially reduce mosquito populations by not letting water stand long enough for mosquito larvae to mature in it, but Asian Tigers' big survival advantage is that their larvae can mature in a bottlecap, or a crevice between plant roots, that humans don't even noticed as a pool of standing water. And they teem in underground sewers, like roaches; they have no problem with any of the other contents flushed through oldfashioned water-flush toilets.
Luckily I'm still able to see, hear, and swat those suckers, and delighted to report that nine out of ten of the ones I kill haven't bitten anybody, but they are undeniably a distraction--not a pleasant one.
"Can't you apply some sort of treatment to get rid of them?" asks somebody, out in what Rush Limbaugh calls Rio Linda, the Land of the Chronically Clueless.
Well, no. Spraying poison never, never, never gets rid of a nuisance species for longer than one generation of that species. Spraying poison destroys the natural predators that hold the nuisance species population down. Predators tend to be bigger animals with longer life cycles, so it takes longer to get them back, and meanwhile the nuisance species rampage unchecked and become real pests. Nobody should even think about trying to poison Asian Tiger mosquitoes. They deserve it, but the people they attack do not. The most natural ways to kill them are also the humane and also the effective ways: by ones.
I thought of doing a whole post about this. Do you say "by ones," "one by one," "one at a time," or "by the each"? I'd heard the other three before Wal-Mart moved in, but only in a post-Wal-Mart world have I heard "by the each." Whichever...that's the way to kill anything you have to kill. Whack the ones that endanger you or your family. Let other living things live.
Before my parents were born, when the Blue Ridge was recovering from intensive logging, someone slick-talked one of my great-uncles into planting cinnamon vines for quick'n'easy ground cover, to stop erosion. Everyone in the family has been pulling these nuisances out of gardens, lawns, and orchards, and blaming the great-uncle (who died old, 35 years ago), for almost a full hundred years. They grow like kudzu in warm weather; every time I walk through the not-a-lawn I pull up a few more, all...summer...long. By ones. I'm the only predator the cinnamon vines have. I prey on them diligently, but the last thing I want to do is poison the native plants, or even the introduced specialties like privet, hibiscus, or tomatoes, the cinnamon vines are trying to smother and choke. Encouraging the plants that are not cinnamon vines is the point. So I pull them out and burn them. One, by one, by annoying little one!
I've been dismayed lately as an e-friend who never seemed the type confessed, and then a real neighbor who never used to be the type caved, to poisoning plants as they grow older. I don't live in their bodies--I'm not even a practicing massage therapist any more--so I don't know how bad the weed problem feels for them. I feel 99% positive that handling poisons will make them feel worse, though.
I will say, for the benefit of my timid neighbor, that feral wineberries are not poisonous. Although they invaded our non-lawns as invasive feral plants, people who think the super-prickly red stems are pretty actually paid to plant these things in their orchards and gardens. The brambles aren't actually harder to handle than blackberries (most of the prickles aren't sharp), and the berries are as edible as raspberries. I see people just assuming that the plant is poisonous because its super-prickly stems look intimidating. When they see only the ripe fruit (popped out of its husk) they assume it's a normal raspberry, eat it, and like it. People who normally enjoy a variety of fresh red, black, and yellow raspberries, and notice the distinct flavors of each cultivar, notice wineberries as a different breed. To most people, a ripe wineberry is a big red raspberry.
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| Photo By Wouter Hagens - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1843577 . Wikipedia mentions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_phoenicolasius) that some people hate and try to eradicate wineberries. That's reasonable if you're trying to cultivate purebred raspberries and don't want the more aggressive species taking over your field, but not if you just feel intimidated by the plant's natural defense against insects. Get a grip, neighbor! |
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| Photo by Rasbak: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ , showing wineberries ripening and bursting out of their husks. (Plants aren't toxic but, like most mature plants, inedible.) |
Wikipedia's page on wineberries contains a fragment, "Chemical control via...glyphosate," which ought to be completed, "...is a crime against humanity." Attention, ignorami of the world: If you can't control weeds by ones, yourself, you should take your rightful place in society as an employer and pay someone who can. I will happily dig up your unsprayed wineberries and transplant them to a loving home. I wait for the husks to pop and reveal the berries within, pick the berries out, and enjoy them, just as you could if you had the brains God gave a goose...gooseberries grow in husks too.
And for a reasonable fee I'll also happily dig up your poison ivy...I don't replant it, but I can get it out of your yard, fast, without poisoning any innocent living thing.
And I also move paper wasps and white-faced hornets; if and when mine recover from whatever's caused the colonies to collapse, I'll adopt yours. Compared with mosquitoes they're positively lovable. Anybody who sprays poison on our native hornets and paper wasps deserves to have his head smashed into a hornets' nest.
I'm overwhelmed by the stupidity of the American people. If we can just get a good solid legal requirement that in order to get a permit to buy poison sprays people have to obtain the consent of everyone living within a mile of the proposed site of poisoning, I'm sure I can cope with the strain of generating silly novels and a culturally diverse blog (it's anonymous, but written from the perspectives of different demographics--ages, backgrounds, interests, and opinions, all predetermined by SEO algorithms) at the same time.
But I need to let everyone know that, in any case, between July 1 and 10 I won't have regular Internet access. Fortuitously, one client has scheduled a vacation for exactly the same time as the cafe's. I'll still be writing, and may or may not get online, during the first ten days of July; I hope to spend at least nine and preferably all ten of those days at home.
Y con suma suerte some of you local readers will use the time to let me help you resolve any wineberry, or poison ivy, or paper wasp, or similar problems you may have, instead of buying something that's likely to kill friendly songbirds and make humans sick.
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| They thrive and multiply on "pesticide" sprays, Gentle Readers--especially the ones aimed specifically at mosquitoes, but they love glyphosate fallout, too! |
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