Day of the Dead Bugs

It’s a pity the internet isn’t scratch and sniff.  The citrus flowers were splendiferous this year – the place was suffused with perfume for weeks.  And now there are lots of baby fruit on the trees – not only on the lemon, mandarin, oranges and grapefruit down in the veggie garden but even on the limes and the kumquat suffering in pots by the back door.

But there’s a nasty smell taking over the garden these days. The stinkbugs are back.

I’ve spotted bronze orange bugs in the garden before but never quite got around to doing anything about it.  I’ve gone for a bit of a Darwinist approach with insect pests in the past.  Organic Tough Love, we might call it.  “Deal with it!  I’m busy!” has worked okay with the Eureka lemon and the Freemont mandarin (and the ruby grapefruit seems to be doing alright too).  But the poor baby blood orange has only grown about 5 cm since I planted it, thanks to sooty mould and aphids (… okay, thanks to neglect).  The one mature fruit tree that was here when we arrived has been smothered by potato vine, scratched by chooks, starved of water and fertiliser, permanently shaded and, of course, parasitised by the odd citrus bug.  No wonder we’ve only seen 3 rather unpleasant oranges in the last 5 years.

So, bugs, it’s time.

There’s something of a 60s Bond film about these pics – I think it’s the Chromakey background.  But maybe it’s also the general Bondishness of stink bugs.  You can imagine a cable car zipping up to their citadel at the top of the lemon tree.  And 007 would need any number of secret weapons from Q’s underground lab to deal with that nefarious blinding spray.  There’s Sean Connery converting a dapper hat into an oxygen mask before fighting off the green and orange horde.

No fancy equipment for Uncle Harry and I when we set out on our mission this morning, just protective glasses, ill fitting rubber gloves and a trug of boiling hot waterNo-one lost an eye, though by the time the bucket was filled with colourful corpses we both smelled atrocious and Harry had a mysterious brown stain on his beetle-pinching fingers.

Despite being a vegetarian for a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d make much of a Buddhist.  Meat-loving Harry felt guilty about the citrus beetle death toll whereas I wielded the seccateurs gloating “Die, bugs, die!!”.  While I was up a stool lopping the most heavily infested branches off the lemon tree (it needed a haircut anyway), I spotted a Halloween-themed scene which made me feel less unnaturally ghoulish.  I particularly like the bit of fly viscera splattered on the right hand side of the frame: Spidey was obviously scuttling from the scene of the crime.  We killed a lot of bugs today but at least we didn’t paralyse them, regurgitate stomach acid onto them and then suck their corpses dry.

Although strictly speaking, if you could face a meal of stinkbug entrails, this probably would probably be a more sustainable alternative to death by washing up liquid. On that funereal note, enjoy All Soul’s Day, folks.  Let’s hope we don’t see any stinkbugs returning from the grave.

The year of the dragon?

I know, I know, it’s the year of the horse.  But could 2014 be the year that our dragonfruit plant finally does the business?  Half a decade we’ve had it in a pot in the sunniest part of the garden, and while it did produce this gorgeous flower for my 40th birthday, that’s been it.  Not a single piece of fruit.

I figured Sydney was just not hot enough, but gardening pro Juke reckons if I treat them right, I should be in business.  I’ve been guilty of botanical stereotyping: pitaya looks like a cactus but apparently it should be treated like a moisture loving tropical epiphyte.

So, with a tremendous amount of cursing and significant perforations in the gardening gloves, it’s out of the constraining plastic pot and into the ground by the sunny back fence.  I’m not psychologically ready to build a heavy duty trellis (and given that various tipsy bits of paling on the yard’s perimeter are held in place by running bamboo and optimism, if I was quick on the draw with the cement I would have to have other priorities).  So I’m hoping the dragonfruit can cope at least for the moment with jerry rigged temporary supports and the odd bit of string.

There’s not many problems in life that can’t be fixed by chicken manure, spoiled hay and weekly deep watering.  The chooks’ bedding seems to be working well for the stupendously fast growing Eureka lemon and the small but fecund Freemont mandarin, so fingers crossed their new neighbour will respond to the same treatment.  I’m also trying to grow Kipfler potatoes at the feet of the citrus using the same basic recipe.  It will either be a triumph or a multi-species nitrogen-burn-off.

Juke’s dragonfruit expert thinks that a cutback before the flowering season’s not a bad thing.  With the kids’ school fair only three weeks away and the plant stall trestle tables to fill, I’m cloning like the wind. The chunks I had to hack off (literally, with a saw – it was surgeon-barber barbarity) have been unceremoniously dumped in pots, with the price-tag as yet to be determined.

Dragonfruit vines seems to be a bit like tetris pieces.  They don’t seem to have obvious “up” or “down” bits.  In their natural habitat they apparently grow aerial roots from pretty much anywhere so with luck my primitively executed cuttings will take.  I’m hoping the prospect of home-grown dragonfruit will shift units, however implausibly shaped those units might be.