THE PILLBUG MANUAL

Inevitably, there are times in life when one has to acknowledge inaccuracies in one's mental archives. Such a time has come again for me (ninth time this week!). But often such errors are understandable, and fortunately seldom have Titanic-type results. This one involves a mere garden matter, specifically the affairs of a single potted plant, as posted about yesterday, regarding which my conclusions weren't exactly Sherlockian; I was too ready to jump to conclusions, a big problem in those less than 100 years of age. 

On my own behalf, let me simply state that when one sees the fragments of impatiens leaves scattered here and there amid frenetic ants, it is natural enough to right away think: its them! The ants did it! Ants always look guilty anyhow, scurrying everywhere like that, all the while looking around like they're about to be caught redhanded; one can be forgiven for thinking them guilty or capable of just about any heinous garden act-- look at the way they Svengali those aphids on my peppers, for example. Guilty.

Well the laurel worked with the ants, but it turns out that the ants were not the culprits!

I had noticed incidentally among the myriad scurrying ants the many pillbugs who were partying big time in their own subdued way-- pillbugs love moist places too, and as everyone knows, pillbugs consume decayed organic matter. Turns out however that, unlike everyone, I didn't read the small print in the Pillbug Manual: pillbugs eat decayed organic matter and tender young shoots, such as my new impatiens plant, the lowlifes.

So my apologies to any of you ants who may have read my previous post; but just let me say for the record that I know you're guilty of something, so take a good long look at your lifestyle and try to turn your self around. You can start by getting those aphids off my peppers.

Now if I can find a cure for those little pills...

GETTING OFF MY LAURELS

Last weekend I put a new impatiens plant in a pot beside the ginger bed for a little decor before the ginger comes up, and this morning noticed that the plant was about half its original size, when all things considered it should be heading in the other direction, dimensionwise.

A quick bit of plant forensics revealed pieces of leaves, buds and blossoms on the soil in the pot and the ground around. I thought at first it might have been a deer sampling the flowers, but, like me, deer don't throw anything away. What remained had been nibbled at, in a familiar, curvy way-- then I spotted the red, guilty-looking ants. Probably because of the heavy rains of the past few days, plus the irrational generosity of impatiens which gives away the farm by providing little droplets of nectar here and there on its person. Thus some of these ants, which love wet areas, had taken over and were having a party on my tab.

Went online and looked for a natural solution if there was one, found several sites saying spray the mothers, dust 'em, kill kill kill, but one site saying crumple up a handful of bay laurel leaves and sprinkle them on the soil around the plant, the scent of the bay leaves will confuse the ants as to the scent of the impatiens. The idea of confused ants had a strong appeal for me, plus I just happen to have a bay laurel tree beginning to tower again in my garden-- I trimmed it a year ago but it's taking over once more, being vitally evergreen and growing like crazy, a real life force, which is why the Greeks and Romans loved it so much as a symbol of highest achievement, but this one is a bit manic; what's more, it has been functionally idle, and in my garden it's earn your keep or move on, we're all working together here, no resting on your laurels. (Sorry.)

Fact is, I myself use few of my laurels, only now and then in winter soup and occasional other cuisines, and as gifts for the rare Japanese folks who know how to use bay leaves (even rarer than those who know how to use oregano). So I went and got a handful of the fragrant leaves and crumpled them (they crumple well), sprinkled them on the soil around the base of the plant and now the ants are running in confusion over and under the bay leaves, saying in ant: Where'd the flowers go? What happened? What's this sudden weird odor? Is this the end of our little community?

Very appealing. So far, so good...

FORECLOSURES

Even splitting as many logs as I do, I'm always surprised when now and then I find living creatures inside one. The other day I was spitting a 50 cm section of hard pale oak, straight and unblemished, with no holes or cracks, and the clean white halves fell apart to reveal a long brown enclave filled with stunned and hunkered-down ants: Armageddon, right there at the heart of a log!

There they'd been, just a minute before, sandbagging securely into the future, safe from the cold, instinctively anticipating warmer days to come and thousands of little ones running around, and the next thing they knew there was a great pounding and cracking, their world split in half and they had no plan, didn't run or attack, scramble or panic, just stood there in shock at the impossible, this sudden intrusion of light, cold and actual weather into the dark silent paradise they had found and made-- not even tending to the eggs! The warriors just standing there, with the frozen air that I suppose always attends the big question...

So I set the halves of the log down on the ground, sunny side up (fine day) to give the little society time to gather their wits about them, find a new paradise and clear out in peace. I can't really preannounce these foreclosures, can I; still, I felt a bit like a US banker. Came back the next day and the ants were still there, but I don't have a sheriff.

Then some days later I was splitting a ca. 50 cm section of red oak and it fell cleanly apart to reveal a wood beetle larvae about 10 cm long, reaching out in a 'What the hell...' sort of way into a new and unimagined air, slowly moving his head back and forth as far as he dared into this unfathomable space where there was no wood, that had nothing at all to do with wood, trying to be where the rest of his world used to be...

The split had gone clean down the middle of his comfy-looking home of narrow darkness, his almost flatland universe, and suddenly half his reality was gone and something inexplicable had taken its place, he couldn't figure it out, I watched him try and try...

He'd been snug and safe and zoned in all there ever was, when half of it was gone in an instant, replaced by light and air containing mysterious fuzzily moving objects like myself - though I'm not sure he could see - he doesn't need eyes in the zero light of his world, all he has to do is chomp and doze and await his great changes - then there he was exploring the nothingness of a vast transformation, probing whatever the absence of wood was, like nothing in his life or history-- His jaws - his best-functioning apparatus, which does everything that to him is worth doing - worked on the air, trying to chomp it, there's always been chomping in his life, that's his job, but this, what is this... looking for wood to grab and bite a path through as always, the only way into his future, but it's too late, I'm the new owner and I have to foreclose...

Again...

SOCIETY ON THE MARCH

While arranging my chair on the deck prior to my evening post-woodsplitting glass of wine, I notice an odd smudge on the deck floor. Leaning closer, I see that it is actually a mass perturbation in the long excursion of a tribe of tiny red ants. I follow the formic safari three or four meters back along the deck, the stream being but a narrow red vein (and hard to see against the stained wood of the deck), except for that patch of chaos beneath my chair where, perhaps, they are debating the wisdom of this move. The trail traces back to where the line emerges from a space between two deck boards, the long red line apparently climbing up from the ground along one of the deck posts.

Curious about where in their world the thousands or millions could be going, I note that after passing beneath me (an hour later they are still going by, in undiminished numbers) they make a sharp turn at a serendipitously fallen weeping-cherry stem that directs them toward their new nirvana, the Heavenly Bamboo growing up through a square hole in the deck. They disappear down into the far corner of the square.

At first glance, I thought maybe they were marauding and had found a massive cache of goodies, such as our honey or my gumdrop stash. A closer look with a magnifier (these ants are really tiny) however, reveals that they aren't carrying any luggage or goodies at all, excepting quite a few marchers who are all carrying identical white nanodots, which, given their uniformity, must be the tribal eggs. I also notice that quite a few of the ants are traveling purposefully in the direction opposite that of the horde. Some of those, too, are carrying eggs. There's always a few who haven't a clue...

The odd thing is that about an hour ago, while still splitting wood pre-wine, I picked up from the ground an old roof tile that had fallen from its place in holding down the tarp on a half-cord of wood I'd stacked in front of the deck. When I picked the tile up, I saw that the underside was entirely covered, to a depth of ½ cm, in tiny red ants, who had been using the tile as a way station on their journey.

Before placing the tile back atop the tarp where it belonged, I tapped it on the ground and all the ants fell off in a seething red pile, an event that must've made local ant headlines. That was about 10 meters from the point at which the ants were now emerging from the deck on their sunset pilgrimage. Could they possibly be the same ants (fast moving!), or are such ants generally on the move hereabouts?

Right beneath me a vast society is on the move in its entirety; countless individuals have picked up their lives by the roots, burned their equivalent of bridges and set out for regions far beyond my chair, carrying all they possess of the past and the future-- a radical transformation, all without complaint, or even a sound. Still they issue from their source in silence...

Why they didn't traverse the shorter distance along the ground beneath the deck, or - if they're the tile ants - a straight line to where they're going, a MUCH shorter distance from the tile epoch than the long roundabout route they're taking (with the added hazard of this big wine-sipping human stepping over their invisible trail) is a question best asked of their leaders, as we humans fruitlessly do of our own politicians. "We are committed by fiat to this course of action; it would be unpatriotic to refuse to follow in the tracks of those brave individuals who are so selflessly sacrificing their lives to advance our cause..." etc. (Even though it's 10 times harder than the smart way, or can never be achieved at all.) In the ant world, as in the human, evidence of leadership or impressively manipulable mannequinship should not be mistaken for wisdom.

I notice the ants are still at it, as the light wanes... So are we.