How do I know that my garden has squash bugs?
Because the other day I was driving into work and Melinda Meyers, horticultural, gardening expert, was on the radio giving out tips and she said,
"Millie, you have squash bugs."
First of all I was shocked that she knew my name, because not many people do. And secondly I was appalled that she would say something like that on the air.
But I did have to admit that all of the symptoms that she began to describe, yellow and brown leaves that curl and have holes in them and plants that bear no fruit, were the exact symptoms that my foliage had.
The expert went on to say that these squash bug creatures lay their eggs on the undersides of the leaves and that was only the beginning. It got a lot worse after that. You see, the squash bugs and their freaking little babies then feed on the very leaves that they call home and while they are all gorging themselves on the floors of their houses they are simultaneously injecting toxic fluids into the plants, which then kills off the fruit.
HOW RUDE is that?
Melinda went on to say that squash bugs can affect cucumber plants too.
That got my blood boiling, because my cucumbers are next door neighbors to my squash plants and they all look gangly and anemic and homeless these days.
And here, all this time I had been blaming my foiled garden on bad dirt. Who doesn't have a little bit of that? Name one person. You can't. Everybody has some and I probably have a little more than others. So, I just figured that my failing garden was due to karma or something. But it wasn't karma at all and it wasn't bad dirt either.
It was squash bugs.
Miss Meyers said that there were a couple of simple solutions to rid your garden of these assholes. Now, this was the part of her story where my eyeballs started rolling into the backs of their sockets and a car beeped as I drifted over the line.
According to Melinda, this is all you have to do,
Take a dish of soapy water and knock the little eggs on the undersides into the dish by tapping the leaves
gently. Next you tear your newspaper into strips, soak it in water and place it around the base of your plants in the evening. The next morning, just after sunrise, you pick up these shredded newspaper articles and toss them out. Apparently the dirty little bastards like to sleep under wet, shredded, newspaper because they are interested in local politics and when you throw away the newspaper you will be tossing out the squash bugs along with any other bad news you might find in there.
Really. You call that simple Melinda?
[one_half_last]It's me, Millie Noe. I'm a writer, not a farmer. And I have many, many, more important things to do in a day, besides harassing a bunch of ugly, toxic-spewing, asshole, squash bugs.[/one_half_last]
But then a funny thing happened. You see Sven decided to power wash the front deck. He's going to restore it and make it beautiful once again. That's my Sven. He understands how sexy this kind of activity is to me and he always aims to please, give or take a few months of foreplay or as calls it, nagging.
What I would like to know is.............
Did anybody else's garden get hit by Typhoon Sven yesterday?
There are no longer any squash bugs in my garden.
As a matter of fact I have not been able to locate Pete the Pepper.
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