Gross Things

Don't read this if you are having lunch. Gross Things are happening in my garden. This is not the spring garden filled with new growth and exploding with hope. No, bugs and old-age have caught up with my plants by now. One of my cucumber plants is drying out and withering. Age? Disease? The tiny baby cucumbers are black and nasty looking. My exotic bean plant that only made one bean now is a place where flies go to die. What's stranger, is that the plant looks great and healthy from the top, but the underside of several of its 8 leaves are covered with dead flies. We called an "environmentally friendly" exterminator to "neutralize" the wasps nest under our deck, and I showed her the flies. She said "wow, I've never seen anything like this. Can I take this leaf (covered in dead flies) back to my boss?" She, and an environmental ed teacher I asked who was also stumped, both postulated "maybe they stick themselves to the leaves after they reproduce as they get ready to die so that the babies can eat their carcass?" Thanks, I feel much better.

But still there are good things growing in the garden, and I can't ignore the big healthy cucumbers and abundant parsley crop just because their neighbor has become a fly graveyard, can I? It reminds me of the time I brought the lettuce mix from my CSA portion to work, and when I opened the bag to wash the lettuce, a spider crawled out. A co-worker said "I would throw the whole thing away!" As if all lettuce doesn't have an insect or 2 on it at some point in it's life? I tried to focus on the fact that the spider proves that my food really was raised organic, but that little white and green "organic certified" logo is so much more tidy looking. I ate my salad anyway, but I was very suspicious of every bite.

Also it looks like my pumpkin plant is going to be a purely ornamental flowering vine; visions of my son and I picking a pumpkin from the garden and carving it for Halloween are withering on the vine. Suddenly I know on a whole new level what it means when a farmer says "the crop failed." Imagine if it was not just your Halloween pumpkin, but your mortgage money for October and November? God bless the Farmers is all I can say.