After this past week I can no longer call myself an organic
farmer. Sigh.
The Japanese beetles got me. I’ve put up with squash bugs
and voles and those nasty invisible beetles that eat up my beans. And while we’ve
had Japanese beetles before, I’ve never reached for the chemical weapons with
any of them. I moved plants around, incentified the cats, and picked thousands
of beetles off plants to drop them to their certain death in my bucket of dish
soap.
But then last year happened. I wrote about it. It was
devastating. They killed my peach and my nectarine trees, both of which were
loaded with their first real crop. I was heartbroken. We ardently applied the
milky spore – spent hundreds on it to be sure we treated all the ground around
the gardens and fruit trees. We ordered new fruit trees and chalked the whole
experience up to the difficult but noble pursuit of organic gardening.
And then I came home from my camping trip in June to find
the Japanese beetles were back by the millions. They were devouring my grapes
which had barely survived the onslaught last year. They had lived, but been
reduced to the size they were the second year of their lives (they are eight
this year). The beetles swarmed my gorgeous plum tree which was loaded with
beautiful tiny purple plums for the first time ever. The raspberries and
asparagus, even the rhubarb were swarmed by beetles.
What the heck? How did this happen? What about all that
milky spore? Seems last year’s beetles must have sent out a message and it went
viral and now all their friends and relatives had converged on our little
hillside for a mass feast.
