Pests

We have gotten back in the swing of things with our "organic" gardening. Instead of gardening with the community garden we are putting our own garden area into use. We have plenty of space and that was one of the reasons we decided to buy this yard.

But, we have discovered an ant hill very near our sunken amended soil garden beds. The last time we planted a garden, without the benefit of all the knowledge we gained from a year of gardening at the community garden, ants came and ate the carrots and onions before they could gain a foothold on life. But those are not the worst pests we have had.

When I was in school, the family housing apartments we lived in were infested with cockroaches. Ick. They didn't bother me too much, but Diane always considered them dirty people pests. Well, she hadn't lived with me too much at that point. Who knows, maybe I was a dirty people. But, they seemed to be in all the apartments........

We had a mouse in one of the houses we lived in. We put out those sticky traps, which we promptly picked up when our friend Howard told us about actually catching a mouse in his sticky trap. It doesn't kill the things, so they screech until you do something about it. His something was to put it outside in the middle of the night, prompting all the neighborhood dogs to howl. The next something he did was to go smash it with a rock. Our sticky traps were replaced with poison, which seemed to take care of things.

At another house, we lived right by one of those community lake type things. This was nice, except that it made a perfect home for a large colony of rats. Usually, the only indication of this was a vague movement on the rocky banks from time to time. That is, until one of them was staring at me from inside my grill when I opened it up for a spring time cookout and a a pair of big eyes was staring up at me. It ran one way and I ran the other.

We have also had:
Bats
Carpenter Bees
Honey Bees
A dead cat, which wasn't ours. The people that picked up dead animals wouldn't come get it cause it was in our yard and not in the street. Hmmmmmm. We could fix that.

I suppose these sort of things are unavoidable.