Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Reclaiming The Neighbourhood


We spent an hour or so at the big nursery up the hill.

Baby plants, not baby babies.

At the end of all the daydreaming and wishful thinking,

We came away with marigolds enough for the 2 very large planters that stand sentinel on either side of the driveway.

I found what gardening tools I possess, mixed up some Miracle-Grow fertilizer and went to work.

Sort of.

While digging around in the first planter to loosen the dirt, I started digging up these funny little leaf wrapped bundles... they seemed to be connected together, unearthed singly and in 2's and 3's.

They were all so neatly packaged... looked like a little leaf had been folded up and tucked in. The bottoms were perfectly flat and round. Maybe a couple of millimeters in diameter (across the bottom) and only a centimeter or so long. Almost like a cup, the way the top went- the top edges were a little leafy all around, and pressed in, a millimeter or so down from the top, was a sort of lid.

Just really weird.

We made Micah open one up... hey! this is fun! open it up and see if there's anything inside!

At least it wasn't a spider.

It still made all of us jump back.

It was a squirmy little gray larvae of some kind.

I tried googling it, but to no avail.

I'm hoping the 30 or so like packages that are strewn over the driveway don't belong to really big, scary, cranky Mommy and Daddy bugs. (this is the stuff science fiction horror movies back in the day were made of)

After liberating what I hope was all the mystery larval bundles, I moved on to the second planter.

And then quickly moved on again.

That dirt didn't need mixing up.

The ant colony that has taken up residence has done a lovely job of chewing up the soil already.

I gave them eviction notice, (which took the form of telling Randall he needs to fumigate that particular pot) and then divided the rest of the marigolds between two of the smaller pots under the living room window on the other side of the house.

How powerfully freaky is a pot full of dirt crawling with tiny, angry black ants?

Especially after seeing that last Indiana Jones movie...

And how freakily freaky is finding a million little larvae leaf pods, neatly planted all around the rim of an otherwise unemployed planter?

I'm still a little itchy.

And if anyone knows what those mysterious bundles might have contained let me know.

Unless they're some sort of rare butterfly

Or some sort of killer bee...


  1. ah, you found my pot.
    it was taken over by ants years ago. i used to have roses in that pot, which left nice soil and the ants moved in. i tried planting carrots in that pot but the ants ate them before they could grow any. once i even took all the dirt out of the pot and replaced it with new fresh dirt from the big dirt pile you got that one time, and sprayed the surrounding area with raid. but the ants were back in a few days.
    they own the pot now, you just have to live with it.