Infestations
Patience and persistence seem to go hand in hand. I’m getting extra lessons in that from our garden.
We are about to finish what is shaping up to be the hottest June on record in the UK. Rain has been uncommonly scarce. Everything in the veggie garden that can bolt has done so quickly. We only got a little spinach before it bolted. Rocket (a salad green), strawberry spinach, coriander, dill… all bolted so quickly we didn’t get to pick much.
On the plus side, it turns out that if the tiny red fruits on strawberry spinach are left in place for a while, they turn sweet. They don’t look any different from when they first appear, but they are slightly softer. We’ve put them in salads.
On the minus side, the ants are multiplying like crazy. In the past, slugs were our nemesis. Now the aphids farmed by the ants are damaging some of our dwarf fruit trees, which are too young to fight them very well.
In earlier years I’ve tried opening the nest with a shovel and pouring in boiling water. I’ve tried baits specifically for ants, sticky traps for ants and everything else I could think of at the time. I tried some ant poison, even though I would rather not.
To underline the need to avoid poisoning something that isn’t my target, it turns out that our neighborhood still has a hedgehog. Garden expert Sue saw it a few days ago, fat and happy in her garden. The one that was killed on the road was smaller and may have been offspring. I don’t want to harm the hedgehog.
The ants laugh at my efforts anyway. I tried to kill the largest nest. They simply moved it.
What can we do instead?
We decided to infest our infestations.
Pre-emptively, we treated the veggie garden with a general packet of nematodes. Those are tiny roundworms that would feast on any of the most common afflictions of the veggies such as slugs. It’s hard to be sure whether that mattered. We have learned not to try to grow crops that are especially vulnerable to slugs.
For the trees, we got ladybird (ladybug) larvae. Half of them went to the cherry tree, which was badly afflicted by cherry black fly for the second year in a row. The other half were evenly distributed across the five new dwarf fruit trees in front.
The ants fought back. They invaded the trees directly to attack the larvae that threatened their aphids. They infested our infestation of the aphid infestation they had unleashed in the first place.
I didn’t have Vaseline to put around the trunks to keep the ants off. Belatedly, I put Vicks Vaporub around the trunks. It looks like that hasn’t worked as well as Vaseline.
Now we’ve ordered nematodes that feast on ants. I can hardly wait to deploy them.
For the moment, we are in an absurd escalating spiral with ants and their aphids. Look at our ridiculous chain of infestations! But we should also be working toward a longer-term solution.
All of this is happening because although we have dramatically improved the overall environment of our back garden in the past few years, it is not yet a balanced ecology. When an ecological system is in balance, things in it provide checks on each other and support for each other. For example, ladybirds (ladybugs) shouldn’t need to be brought in to keep aphids from overrunning everything. Enough ladybirds should turn up naturally.
Before next year’s growing season, we need to adjust our planting plans. The front lawn has already become covered with wildflowers for bees and butterflies, but we haven’t grown enough of the specific plants that attract ladybirds. We should correct that. When the lower back garden project is finished, it will include a cat flap in the front fence to allow hedgehogs to saunter into a new and welcoming fernery sheltered from direct sunshine and the north wind. From there, hedgehogs will be able to waddle into the rest of the back garden where slugs thrive. Our dogs are smart enough to quickly learn to leave them alone and keep local cats away.
Such changes don’t come to fruition instantly. They take time.
We’ve got to think about what else the garden needs to become a settled, self-balancing environment and make those adjustments. Needing to infest the infestations is a sign that we still don’t have it right.
With patience and persistence, we are determined to turn our garden into a place that is not only nice for us to spend time in but also nice for nature.
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Postscript: This can be done on a scale much larger than a home garden. If you are interested in what it would take to apply these concepts to farming, I recommend George Monbiot’s recent book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. It starts out with pages and pages examining a shovelful of dirt in great detail. Keep reading to get past that, but don’t skip the beginning. You won’t have to remember all that detail to have those pages provide the context to understand the rest of the book, which is utterly fascinating. There are ways to get as much yield from a farm as we do now, but with lower costs and working with nature more than against it. (Disclosure: That is an affiliate link.)
Here are a couple of things to try. I have struggled with nests of fire ants for years. One particular problem was a raised bed for vegetables. Obviously I did not want to use poison there, but I did have some luck with Dawn detergent dissolved in water. It would knock down the nest, but they always came back. I used orange oil, being careful to keep it away from the roots of plants, mixed with water and detergent. Same thing. The ants came back. Having read that corn meal is poisonous to plants, and being aware that it is actually a good source of nitrogen for the plants, I finally bought some corn meal and spread it all over the bed. It worked! No more fire ants in that planting bed. It’s worth a try, anyway.
Now about the aphids. What I have used for years is simple. A small amount of dishwashing detergent—I use Dawn—mixed with water sprayed directly on the infested leaves will smother the aphids. Just be careful to avoid the ladybugs! Another non poisonous treatment is yellow sticky sheets, which attract the aphids and then they can’t get loose. The problem with this is that occasionally a ladybug will land on the sheet, which we definitely do not want.
Just keep trying.