The Japanese beetles have been the pest of the summer thus far, way worse this year than the previous three. They’re munching my rhubarb, my hops, and most distressingly to me, my zinnias—one of the few plants I grow that’s usually trouble-free.
Twice a day I make the rounds, knocking the shiny beetles into a jar of soapy water. I’ve got quite a collection now, a real dead bug sun tea that I am considering dumping all over the zinnias as a repellant. But I suppose I don’t want my cut flowers smelling like the black magic in that jar.
When I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11, my grandfather paid my brother and me to go around the yard knocking Japanese beetles into metal coffee cans full of diesel fuel. The going rate was a penny a beetle, and yes, settlement was delivered only after we dumped the cans out onto the gravel driveway and picked through the dead bugs, counting. I can still feel the sensation of sorting those prickly-footed beetles, slick with stinky fuel that clung to my fingers. A penny a piece doesn’t sound like much, but the beetles were thick that year and I made about $20, which at that time was the most money I’d ever earned.
Who would have thought that twenty-five years later I’d be walking around my own garden, knocking beetles to their deaths? Though I guess now we’re a bit more enlightened about pest control and chemical exposure and know that diesel fuel belongs in the tractor, not in my beetle jar. Still, the method is the same.