The dirty side of gardening
By: Linda McCarthy
Lawn mowers are humming, mulch trucks are making deliveries, hedge clippers are clipping, and roto-tillers are tilling.
A few days of warm temperatures and, with the exception of my kids, people are emerging from their winter lairs to beautify their properties. It’s a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the great outdoors.
Gardening has always been a favorite pastime of mine. I like digging in the dirt; it’s quiet and the results can be gratifying.
But perhaps most importantly, nobody bothers me. As soon as my sons hear the garage door open they make themselves scarcer than hen’s teeth.
The excuses they come up with are so inventive and bizarre that I’m sure they each have lucrative futures as fiction writers. If they spent half as much time and effort raking as they do trying to get out of yard work they could reproduce the hanging gardens of Babylon in my backyard. I don’t even bother to ask them for help anymore.
I do seem to attract unwanted company of another variety. The bugs in my garden border on mutants.
Remember that B movie "Them"? Giant ants threaten the very existence of the human race. The things I’ve encountered in my yard make those Hollywood monsters look like gnats.
I’ve seen hairy spiders the size of my fist spinning intricate webs on my deck. If they weren’t so gross, I might actually stop to admire their handiwork.
Unfortunately, that’s hard to do when you’re running in the opposite direction. And by the way, humans can move at the speed of light when properly motivated.
I was completely baffled when I thought my garden might be the site of a secret underground hanger. That’s until I realized the flying objects I saw weren’t planes at all, just some type of buzzing things the size of B-52 bombers.
I watch them take off and land with more regularity than Jet Blue. I thought about calling the exterminator, but the thought of him having to tear up my yard to determine the extent of the colony made me nervous. I figure I’ll just wait for the inevitable giant sink hole to develop and take it from there.
Not that I’m worried about my house dropping into the ground; the carpenter bees burrowing through the wooden eaves will have the place destroyed from the top to bottom long before that happens.
Those critters are huge! Forget fly swatters; I used an iron skillet to hit one and it left a dent. That only served to aggravate him, and he flew back to the nest to alert his buddies. I now have to don beekeepers garb to get the mail.
My husband, Do-it-Yourself Dave, tried to fix the problem last year. It took him three months to replace one board.
The bees took advantage of the time by setting up shop on the other side of the house. They’ve been nibbling and reproducing there at record speeds.
Obviously, the time has come to call a professional, and by that I mean a realtor.
Linda McCarthy resides in Robbinsville with her husband and three children.

