Wednesday, January 05, 2005

In this world

of doom & gloom it is a minor thing. But major for me. The fucking locusts are eating the shit out of our citrus trees & I can't get rid of them.

We bought three a year ago, a lemon, a lime & a grapefruit. The lime we planted amongst the trees in the garden where it struggled but grew. The grapefruit we left in the earth inside its black plastic wrapping where it grew quite happily. The lemon went into what was supposed to be a part of the garden but with poor soil & so previously home to a wild gathering of opportunistic weeds.

All three flowered. Then the ants came along & decided the fertilised fruit would be their larder & ate the buds. One grapefruit survived, probably because they're fairly large fruit & by the time the ants had got through the others, this was too far along & defeated them. But the plants still looked quite attractive. Then came the locusts. They ignored the lime most of the time, but now the lemon especially looks like it got so sick of having bad hair days that it ripped all of its hair out.

I've transplanted the lemon & the lime into plots & am monitoring them. I go to the hardware store & look for weapons of mass destruction but they all say "do not use when the temperature is above 30°C" & it's that for at least ¾s of the year here. I have become a locust-killing machine, & feel no shame.

Forgive me, Gautama, for I know very well what I'm doing.

1 comment:

Jim said...

As to the locusts, there's not much you can do but either pick them off or spray constantly. As to your secondary problem, the ants, in the U.S. there is a product called "Tanglefoot", which is simply a sticky sap like substance, non-toxic, that you put around the trunk of the tree. The ants cannot pass by it and are thereby thwarted. Be warned, the stuff is hard to get off clothing.

Good luck.