Sherlock Holmes had Moriarty.
Inspector Gadget had The Claw.
Who is my nemesis?
Who is my greatest foe in the fight for ‘the good life’?
Earwigs!
Yes, I know you’re laughing right now (or flicking through to another website) but I’m not joking.
You gardeners out there – you know.
When the caterpillars appeared at the end of spring, after I planted out our first round of peas, our seedling survival rate was about one in five.
If you’d driven past early enough on one of my days off you would have seen The Man and I on our knees in between the plants crushing each crawly critter individually.
The personal touch – it really does make a difference.
Then the earwigs hit.
They are scary things! No I mean it - The Girl and I took a close up look through her bug-catcher and magnifying glass and those mutant little legume-munchers are all serrated secateurs and legs.
Cockroaches with crab claws that actually hack off your seedlings at the stem.
They swept through my burgeoning vegie patch like locusts through Egypt – or maybe I mean the Angel of Death – whatever…only one in 10 survived!
My fellow hippy wanna-bes bombarded me with advice.
The Man’s dad (an ex-commune commando) suggested a trench of alum around the garden’s perimeter – the earwig equivalent of walking over broken glass.
The chemist looked at me very strangely when I asked to buy alum.
The almost-organic chicken farmers up the road suggested individually wrapping each seeding stem in alfoil.
Not an easy consideration when the seedlings are just two centimetres high.
So we gave in and made the pilgrimage to ThriftyLink for the equivalent of earwig Napalm.
But I couldn’t do it.
Anything that has to be mixed in a darkened room in a plastic-only container (no metals, no ceramics) with rubber gloves and sprayed on a windless day (but not directly onto seedlings for some reason) just can’t be good.
It’s still sitting high on a shelf in a darkened, locked room next to the rubber gloves.
Then we heard about beer traps!
We raided The Girl’s craft box for old yoghurt containers, buried them in the garden and served up a selection of SA’s finest brews.
Our garden is now an earwig frat party every night.
Little six-legged Bonos drowning in alcohol – the corpses are piling up and, as a result, the chooks are enjoying a little nightcap before bed every evening.
Thankfully, at least for The Man and his Coopers collection, earwigs aren’t beer connoisseurs and they’re quite happy to wallow in the dregs from his homebrew.
Homebrew – nature’s own Napalm.
Every day you can see The Kids tiptoeing through the seedlings, a stubby in each hand – and as a bonus, the neighbours don’t visit anymore either.
It works for all household pests!
No, all jokes aside, apparently earwigs aren’t the only alcoholic insects in the world of nature.
Snails and slugs also have an Irish tendency to over-imbibe on the amber fluid.
But what about the grasshoppers when they hit?
Will I need something top shelf when they come around?
I wonder how easy it is to whip up a Glayva or Glenfiddich at home?
Maybe they’ll be happy with Mescal Tequila. Works for the worms eh?
Well – we can only wait and see.
I’m sure there’s a metaphor in here somewhere.
But the fact is, at Uni I knew men who could drown themselves in the same, relative amount of cheap homebrew and make it to class the next day with nothing but a hangover and a hazy memory of being thrown out of a moving pub at 3am in the morning.
While earwigs and uni students may enjoy the same poison – it’s clear to me that insects just can’t hold their liquor.
But mostly, what I have truly learnt from this little experiment is that if I had really known how many earwigs there are in my vicinity I never, ever would have slept again.
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