We were a young couple then, living in Brenham in a mobile home. Leah raised flowers and a few tomatoes and fought hard against an unusually high number of grasshoppers that summer.
It is likely she had never paid much attention to grasshoppers before, other than trying as a kid to catch one before it jumped away. That summer, however, she learned of their propensity for damaging crops.
That summer, an older couple in our small church held an ice cream social for church members. People churned up homemade ice cream and shared in a fun gathering in our hosts’ back yard.
Leah and I were still not entirely at ease in such a group. We were new to the community and, more notably, considerably younger than almost all of the others. Don’t misunderstand, we were welcomed and loved and all of that, but we were still finding our “grown up” identities, I guess.
A few dozen of us were sitting and standing around the grounds, many in lawn chairs they brought, and we were all enjoying each other’s ice cream.
Leah was sitting at the end of a picnic table, best I remember. I believe I was standing nearby. Surely, conversation was light and rather predictable, until ...
A grasshopper – a large, meaty one – made the mistake of landing on the picnic table right next to my lovely young bride. Without thinking, Leah sprung into action, as she had learned to do during her summer grasshopper campaign, and squashed the grasshopper before it had a chance to ponder whether it desired vanilla or chocolate.
Almost as swiftly, she looked up to find the other women looking at her. She mumbled something about grasshoppers eating her plants and the women nodded in understanding.
Well, we’re currently in an all-out battle against caterpillars.
I don’t know if everyone is experiencing a caterpillar explosion this year or if we were simply a moth breeding hotbed last year, but the cute, hairy, crawling larvae have wreaked considerable damage on our garden.
Some potato and purple hull pea plants have been stripped of leaves. Our okra crop did not start out well to begin with and it’s particularly hurtful to see pests chewing on them.
Large farmers tackle such a problem with various chemicals and poisons, to which I understand the insects continue to adapt.
We take a more hands-on approach.
Or boots-on.
Actually, I’ve developed a technique using a metal stake to first flip the caterpillar to the ground and then to quickly end its leaf-eating existence.
It’s with some hesitance I even confess to mass killings (as many as 100-plus one evening) because I know a lot of people will not understand. Of course, most of them rely exclusively on store-bought food and think it is grown without harming any living creature.
(I refer them to the earlier mention of poisons.)
No, it’s just part of the circle of life. I do not enjoy eviscerating the little squirming critters; it’s just a case of them being in the wrong place. Had their parents stayed in the woods, this never would have happened.
(c) 2010 by Steve Martaindale
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