One day in June last year, I found two pretty not-so-little beetles copulating in my garden. Not knowing what they were, and to be on the safe side, I tenderly carried them to a different part of my property and set them down to carry on.
A week later, I had quite a few of these pretty beetles leaving large and irregular holes in my pole beans, my cannas, and my okra. I decided to find out what they were - Japanese Beetles!
After this, I diligently swept them into soapy water whenever I could. They still managed to destroy my pole beans, to leave my canna foliage looking like very ugly lace, and to reduce my okra crop to very few.
The following spring, this spring, I thought I was being very smart by spraying my entire yard with nematodes that were supposed to kill the grubs.
A week or so ago I saw my first Japanese Beetle. I began to diligently sweep them into a little container of soapy water, one or two at a time, whenever I came across the little effers.
"Not too bad" I thought.
A few days ago, I found at least thirty enjoying themselves on a pot of sweet potatoes. I got as many as I could, but they would drop down into the foliage and escape. The next day, there were hundreds of them chomping down on my sweet potato foliage. I got as many as I could off, and sprayed the whole thing with soap/neem/essential oil spray that I hoped would deter the beetles.
I went out this morning to find the sweet potatoes free of Japanese Beetles.
"Hurray! It worked!" I said aloud.
HA
I turned around to find THOUSANDS (OK maybe not thousands, but a ridiculous number) of the nasty creatures all over my rhubarb!
HORRORS!
I stood there despondently, trying to decide whether or not to just give up and let them have the rhubarb - surely my little container of soap wasn't a deadly enough weapon to eradicate these awful bugs.
War is war. We do what we must. I got a big bucket of soapy water, set it down next to the rhubarb, and proceded to carefully cut whole leaves of rhubarb off, to gingerly carry the scoop-like leaves over to my bucket, and to jubilantly plunge the whole leaf in. I could kill ten or more of the bugs in one plunge. It was wonderful.
So here's my plan now. I will spray the plants the beetles like, except for the rhubarb, with the soap/neem/water mixture so the beetles will choose another plant, the rhubarb. I'm hoping the rhubarb will act as a trap, so that I can go out and annihilate the beasts by cutting off rhubarb leaves and dunking those in my murderous bucket. I get to kill ten or more of them at a time. The rhubarb I can sacrifice for this year, so that all the other plants a Japanese Beetle loves will go on to produce.
Japanese Beetle in the Suds
That's not my only disaster. Some of you may remember my ingenious plan to trellis cucumbers. It looked like this, and seemed so smart. I was going to put chicken wire fences, two feet high, along those white lines and on the right side of the bed. The plan was for the cukes to nicely grow to the west so that I could stand on the east, lean in, and happily pluck cukes off.
Of course, the cukes went east (
Cucumber Jungle
These plants are each surrounded by chicken wire fencing, with openings too small to get my hand in to happily pluck cukes. For instance, how am I supposed to get this one?
All is not lost however. If I am very clever, and make like a contortionist, I can get the cukes. It's not easy, and I am not happy while doing it (a cucumber leaf jabbed into my eye) but I did get a nice slew of cukes, and I managed to pickle them.
First cuke harvest of 2023
My first ever batch of sour dill pickles
There are a great many more cucumbers coming. I almost wish they wouldn't.
And I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad that my next door neighbor, whose vegetable garden is less than fifty feet from mine, has no Japanese Beetles at all.
images are all mine