The Lessons of Raspberries, Japanese Beetles & Winston Churchill.

Early this spring I tore out all of the raspberry canes at the roots and promptly burned them, following the recommended guidelines for old brambles (seven years). It was not too painful a chore. Raspberry plants are not at their best in clay soil, and despite my best efforts - proper pruning and fertilization - they have been only a moderate success in my garden.

What my raspberry plants did provide me with more reliably than fruit were Japanese beetles, the miniature WMDs of the insect world, gifted to us from Japan in 1916 via a shipment of iris bulbs received by way of port in Riverton, New Jersey.

Until I planted those blasted raspberries I could readily boast of having Japanese beetle-free gardens. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but either way, two years after the raspberries were planted, the Japanese beetles located me by way of their internal GPS. At first the ravenous barbarians seemed to prefer the raspberries to anything else in the garden. Fine! I convinced myself they could have the damn things. "Devour them all!" I cried.

But this was only an early stage of denial: bargaining with the insect gods to sacrifice my middling raspberries for the sake of everything else they love to eat. Then, as they swarmed and mated and buzzed and oozed their slatternly perfume to the wind like degenerate gluttons at Caligula's penultimate orgy, hatred seeped into my arteries.

I was cornered, indentured to confession: I have Japanese beetles. Oh, how these four words chilled my marrow. I vowed to fight, to be brave, to not let them beat me at my game. Every evening after work I stalked the little demons with reprisal, plunging hundreds of wriggling beetles into a bucket of soapy water where, like hoards of flying Rasputins, they clung to life with shocking tenacity. To witness this phenomenon, I immediately discovered, is as equally horrific as it is beautiful.

The war declared, I began to doubt my natural approach to I.P.M. Each time I entered a hardware store I found myself drifting, trance-like, toward the shelves of brightly colored pesticide containers, every label a declaration of annihilation of loathsome garden pests.

Then one day I purchased a bottle of Sevin (carbaryl).

I applied the Sevin to my raspberries. The Japanese beetles seemed mildly irritated but only a handful died. Some flew away before I sprayed them. Many departed unscathed even after I sprayed them.

The day following the first application, the beetles returned to dine, yesterday now forgotten.


As I approached the raspberry patch I stopped to listen to the hum of pollinators collecting nectar up and down the flowering canes. My eyes followed a spider as it danced across a billowing web like an eight-legged ballerina, her private stage hidden within a jungle of glowing green leaves and flickering shadows. Brown ants, fearless, busily streamed atop the shaded leaf litter as they carried the food that would sustain their colony.

When I thought of the lethal rain of insecticide falling down upon all this life, all this important activity, silencing it for the sake of a few raspberries, I reminded myself why I garden in the first place: to woo nature closer and learn from what I see.

In battle a man is tested.

Winston Churchill once said, "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesmen who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforseeable and uncontrollable events."

I did not ever again apply Sevin to my raspberries but instead returned to hand murdering each Japanese beetle, hurling them into a sudsy bucket. The rows neatly gleaned, I dug a hole and buried the dead.

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

For more garden inspiration, you can follow him on Facebook. 

The Gardener as Ecologist

Whenever I give a garden lecture I look for opportunities to emphasize ecology. I view gardeners as environmental stewards. These two things must always go hand in hand in my opinion.

But many people take up the practice of gardening with only a local retailer as their ultimate source of knowledge, which is unwise, and possibly dangerous. Certainly, gardeners need things - hoses, fertilizer, bags of compost, a half dozen strong wooden stakes and so on - what we don't need is another spray for a problem that is not really a problem in the first place.

When you ask the clerk who is busy flooding the potted perennials with a fire hose, "Will this product kill the grubs in my lawn?" he will predictably blink a few times, glance at the bag in your cart and say "yep" and you will happily go to the register satisfied that you have made a wise choice in parting with 40 bucks.

The notion that there is a product for every perceived garden woe is one that I blame on both the corporations and the consumers.

First, the corporations are at fault for treating pest control like bad breath; something everyone should do something about. Second, the consumers are to blame for assuming that the college kid with the summer job at the nursery is studying entomology or has even bothered to read directions on the bag, which will clearly tell the consumer that the window of opportunity for treating grubs in the lawn has expired. Applying it now is simply a waste.

Over 12,000 pesticide products are currently registered for use in and around our homes. American households use an estimated 80 million pounds of pesticides and spend over nearly $2 billion annually for them. The largest portion of total U.S. home and garden pesticides used each year is with herbicides at approximately 70%, followed by insecticides and miticides, fungicides, and other pesticides.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey 1999 report on the quality of our nation’s waters, least one pesticide was found in almost every water and fish sample collected from streams and in more than one-half of shallow wells sampled in agricultural and urban areas.

Unknown quantities of pesticides are liberally applied by gardeners without regard to both potential short term and long term environmental consequences. Without sufficient data from scientific research it is impossible to know exactly how carefully and responsibly these products are being used.

It is my opinion that Americans need to better understand the environmental impacts of the pesticide products they purchase and apply to their lawns and gardens. Consumers have the rights and the power to do so, and therefore they should.

I do not advocate that all chemicals are bad, nor do I expect all gardeners to go exclusively organic. What I expect from gardeners is responsible practices, and good portion of this requires education.

A responsible gardener has taken the time to understand precisely when a pesticide may be helpful.

A responsible gardener knows that pests come and go and most will only do mild to moderate damage, resulting in little, if any, loss.

A responsible gardener understands that soil health and plant vigor play a large role in pest management.

A responsible gardener has at least a general understanding of pesticides - which pesticides are more, or less, persistent in soil and water; which are harmful to bees, pollinators and other beneficial insects; which are the most toxic to humans, animals, birds and aquatic organisms.

Most of all, a responsible gardener is one who considers everything he or she does in the garden as having an impact somewhere else in the biosphere.

As environmentalist Rachel Carson once said, "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. "






Sources: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/PI177

http://www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/reduce_pesticides.html

Kill Ants While Preventing Pneumonia!

Bayer Corporation recently introduced a new product called Bayer Advanced Home Pest with Germ Killer. Now you can kill ants, roaches, ticks and other common home pests while at the same time reduce "99.9% of the Germs Bugs May Leave Behind."

Do the marketing geniuses at Bayer honestly believe that the world needs a new home insect killer that also kills common germs that are not even spread by insects in the first place?

Bayer seems to be banking on the assumption that consumers don't know the difference between insects and germs, praying on people's irrational fears of icky things that spread sickness. It's not by accident that product label uses the word "bugs" instead of insects. The word "bugs" multiple meanings, two of which are "insects pests" and "contagious illness."

The word "pest" derives from Middle English; pestilence, meaning “‘infected, unwholesome, noxious.’” Plagues, of course, are some of the more famous forms of pestilence. The Bubonic plague was spread by rats that carried fleas that were infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis.


Approximately 10-15 people in the U.S. per year contract the plague, according to the CDC. The majority of these infections stem from rats that are kept in the home, as pets.

Bayer Advanced Home Pest with Germ Killer does in fact kill fleas. However, it's worth mentioning that statistically the chances of you contracting the plague are
30,405,927.4 : 1

Bayer Advanced Home Pest with Germ Killer also "reduces" the germs Staphylococcus aureus and Enterobacter aerogenes.

Diseases caused by Staphylococcus aureas range from pimples to meningitis. Enterobacter aerogenes can cause opportunistic infections in open wounds and secondary gastro infections.

But neither Staphylococcus aureus or Enterobacter aerogenes are spread by insects!

In fact, both of these infection-causing germs are spread by humans, and as much as 20% of the human population are long term carriers, which means they host these germs indefinitely.

Americans do have an ill-informed ideology about germs, this much is true. It's become fashionable to mock the fastidious as "clean freaks" as if following the guidelines of science to avoid communicable illness is obsessive.

So it may not be so outrageous, after all, that the Bayer Corporation stumbled upon the idea of combining bug spray and germ killer in one. Consumers may not have been asking for it outright but obviously those crafty market researchers on Madison Ave. have been able to confirm a "demand" for such a product as stupid as this one.

How much longer before insecticides start showing up in my shower gel?

Desperate Houseplants

ABC's Desperate Housewives is a show about a group of neighbors on a permanently sunny suburban street called Wisteria Lane. It's a wry, soapy spoof of American culture narrated by a dead woman.

Rule number one in soap operas is that domesticated ladies must cook, clean and garden in very nice clothes and yet never get dirty. Now and again an artfully placed smudge will show up on a cheek or maybe an argument will involve the spray hose. Otherwise, these girls are flawless, along with their gardens.

Wisteria Lane is heavy on white picket fencing, arbors, porch railings and posts, all handsomely entwined with blooming Wisteria vines. Many scenes are filmed with purple or white Wisteria gently waving in the fake breeze (blown by big electric fans) figured somewhere in the composition. Wisteria blooms literally every day of every year in this neighborhood, without fail, and every flower is always at its loveliest peak.

Gardening is not a plot device on Desperate Housewives but it plays a pivotal role in defining the lifestyles of the central female characters. While some of them are shown actually working in their gardens - especially the Martha Stewart clone Bree Hodge (played by Marcia Cross) - others merely ignore their landscaping with equally fabulous results.

Gabby Solice (Eva Longoria-Parker) once kept a gardener in her employment but even after he was history (she broke off their affair to save her marriage) her landscape remained as beautiful as ever.

Every home in this make-believe neighborhood has virtuous green lawns, clear of dandelions and crabgrass. Nodding Agapanthus bloom in every border and never require dead heading. Roses flower ceaselessly without the application of fungicides. It never rains. (Or, if it does, the sun manages to keep shining in that Hollywood way.) Their lawns are not plagued by Japanese beetles or chinchbugs, and nothing gets mildew.

The only thing that requires a spray in their perfect enclave is sexy hair.

Desperate Housewives needs an additional story arc that more directly involves gardening.  Perhaps Susan Meyers (Teri Hatcher) could find a new hobby, one that does not involve looking for a man.  Something much more interesting. Vegetable Gardening, let's say.  

Susan starts with a few tomato plants that wilt suddenly and drop their fruit, which sends her in a panic to the garden supply store, where she spends a hundred dollars on products that guarantee "firm, ripe, juicy tomatoes just like your grandma used to grow!"

Susan's tomatoes wither and die despite her best efforts, but instead of discouraging her,  her experience with crop failure deepens her determination to grow a decent vegetable.  So she rents a tiller, trucks in compost, hires a cute carpenter (they have a fling but she dumps him for her new passion - the garden) to build cedar trellises, installs drip irrigation and starts a compost pile.

A couple of years pass.  Susan has expanded her vegetable beds considerably after removing three large trees, installed a cold frame, improved soil tilth and mulched heavily.  She rotates annually, plants green crops and picks off each potato beetle by hand.

One lovely afternoon when the Wisteria is in full bloom her old friends invite Susan to lunch. It's been so very long, they plead, since they have had a chance to catch up.  Oh, no, Susan declines, I cannot go out today.  You see, I have to apply the fish emulsion before noon, when the sun is very hot.

Another day?  Her friends suggest.  Unfortunately not, Susan replies.  There is too much to accomplish in the garden: so many weeds!  Check for squash bugs!  If I don't get the egg clusters there will be hell to pay in a few weeks!  And I have all that compost to spread!

Over a glass of wine her old friends shake their befuddled heads.  What happened to her, they ask?  We barely know her these days.  She used to be so much fun and now all she wants to do is garden.

Poor Susan, they all agree, she really needs to get a life!

Good Yews

By Shane VanOosterhout

The mighty yew (Family: Taxacaea; Genus Taxus) is a woody plant I used to disdain. How ridiculous of me. What I understand now is that I was judging the yew not on its own merits but instead because it is often used poorly in the home landscape.

I should clarify. The yew is used extensively in the home landscape because it possesses remarkable characteristics, mainly that it is nearly indestructible (tolerates abusive pruning) and is evergreen even in part sun to part shade.

Professional nursery growers love the yew because it propagates easily from cuttings. Landscapers love the yew because it is a budget-friendly shrub and provides instant green on the new, barren home site. In effect, it is probably the utilitarian nature of the yew that has contributed to unintended ugliness in our country.


Yews can grow 30-60 feet and spread 15-25 feet. There is a famous 300-year-old hedge on Bathurst Estate in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England that is 40 feet tall that requires the aid of cherry pickers and two days' work to keep its shapely figure.

As an ornamental the yew has quite literally defined the gardens of the upper classes for centuries. Descriptions of lovelorn women scampering breathlessly through tall shrubbery is a veritable staple of British Empire narrative.

In the United Kingdom the yew is highly romanticized, its history full of lore, long-associated with mysticism, Druid culture and fertility rituals. The heartwood was used for crafting the longbow, a formidably powerful weapon used for defense and hunting.


In most American landscapes yews are planted on small lots where homeowners eventually begin to fear them or hate them as is evidently plain in their need to attack them with saws or throw bicycles at them.

Pruned or not, the yew is at its most stately and beguiling when allowed to develop some stature. Larger yews have elegance; they are regal and bespeak their ancient story. The needles are superior in the garden, their glossy foliage dark and powerful, providing essential texture, form and color.

The best looking yews I spot in neighborhoods are those that were planted with the intent of "disguising" the air condition units or the electric box. They are generally ignored which means they are given permission to grow. After 10-15 years these yews become handsome specimens even if they do tend to look a bit goofy stuck out on the corner of the lot with no companions to keep them company.


Nervous types get antsy when it comes to the toxicity of the yew, *banning them from playgrounds or anywhere children might play. Sources are known to erroneously report that the fruit (aril) is poisonous. The author(s) of an article on Botanical.com state of the yew: "Poisonous Parts---Leaves, seed and fruit" but in fact the poison taxane resides in the seed not the flesh of the fruit. (A reminder to carefully check your sources when researching online).

As a maturing gardener I've come to love the yew in a way I never thought I would. Plants have little say in where they end up in the landscape and I suppose it is not always fair to blame them for looking ruinous. I've always said that if plants could talk we would not have to dig them up and relocate them 20-30 times before finding them a proper home.

If you have a spot in your landscape to plant just one single yew where it can gain some real size I highly recommend doing so. Resist shaping it. Let it be. In time you will discover why our cousins across the pond hold the beautiful, practical yew in such high esteem.



*41 percent of all poisonings reported occur in the home kitchen, 21 percent in the bathroom and 12 percent in the bedroom, leaving 26 percent for other places, according to Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Statistically. the garden is not such a dangerous place for children.