Various Veins
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I may come across as a wee bit dizzy here. It was a whirl of family events last weekend.
On Saturday the families of Ross and Martha Andrews and Allen and Gretta Walsh, as many of us as could get there, met in Nixon to renew acquaintances and give younger folk a sense of their tribal roots.
Three of the four progenitors are dead. Eugene Walsh, Allen's brother, and myself were there, honorary chiefs, I suppose. As in all families, every member has a story. Some are tragic, some heroic, and all worth hearing.
Maybe you'd like to know how the tribe came into existence. I was taken into Gretta's home before she was born, her mother being my mother's sister. Gretta and I were treated as siblings, and so Allen became my brother-in-law. OK?
Sunday being Father's Day, the festivities rocked on.
I was invited to a picnic dinner at the Lions Park in Vienna. Bev Hickey was the patriarchal father. My link is through his daughter, Ellen, mother of two of my grandsons. There were other fathers under the pavilion. One is of my generation. Sam Helsdon is father of one of Bev's sons-in-law. Sam and I exchanged memories and matters of interest. One highlight, a patron of the arts bought Sam's still life of a jack-in-the-pulpit at a recent sale in Tillsonburg.
Sunday evening the party moved to my digs in Straffordville. The kids, all five were here. Nathaniel, grandson, did barbecue duty. Pot luck added sugar to supercharge my headspin.
Peg and Jane brought a warning from Brownsville, Red Lily Beetles have arrived in the area.
Doug, our horticultural guru, said the pest arrived from China to USA many years ago. They have been stripping the leaves off crown lilies in the Niagara area for years. I remember being given a guided tour through the greenhouses and parks when Doug was a student at the Niagara Parks School of Horticulture. He introduced Martha and me to these beautiful little red beetles. They look like streamlined lady bugs less the spots. How could one kill such a gem? He showed us how to do it.
Like a terrorist mole, the adults over-winter in the soil of our lily beds. They lay eggs on the leaves. The larvae have ravenous appetite. They chow down on the leaves and coat themselves with their feces. The resultant product looks like bird droppings. No bird or other predator wants to nosh on that stuff. Few humans want to get it on their fingers.
Besides being an effective cloak of invisibility, the crud protects the larvae from insecticides, most of which the species are immune to anyway.
Armed with paper towels and containers, our party went on patrol of the flower beds in my back yard. Eeyuk! They're here!
They haven't reached the stage where the insects drop to the ground and proceed to eat their way to the crown leaving bare stalks much like a tobacco plant that's been primed of its leaves. Without their food factories the plants die.
Jane told us if we go after the adults, lay a cover of white paper around the plant because when the beetles drop to the ground they land belly up. Their bellies are black, invisible in the mulch that surrounds the plants.
With the patrol completed we demobbed. Hands were scrubbed with soap and water, chairs assembled at the dining table, and we demonstrate that insects are not the only creatures to eat with gusto.
Check your lily beds!