Friday, March 30, 2012

Nuked Them Earthworms

They were everywhere ... like the slimy creatures in Night of The Creeps (1986) ... crawling on the curbs outside my lawn, on the walkway to the house, outside the front door, crawling up the garage door, hanging from it like a slimy curtain when it was opened, and raining down on the car as it rolled out from underneath it! It was an infestation! They were there ... come rain or no rain ... and they were committing suicide as the sun shone on them and dried them out. And, then they were laying there and rotting. There was smell of deathly decay everywhere! Sound like a zombie movie, right?
And then when you get to hear:
EARTHWORMS ARE GOOD FOR THE GARDEN!
You know how it would have felt?
I had heard in all those Biology lectures on saprophytes and how they ingeniously eat soil and poop it out, enriching it with nutrients. Talk about natural fertilizer! Also, they burrow through, maintaining the air and moisture balance of the garden. That's all sweet talk, ladies, because a recent earthworm infestation in my garden made me dive (not literally) into the world of worms! 
Army worms, grub worms, killer worms, earthworms, you name it. I got to know all of them. My problem was earthworms! A lawn care website mentioned, for a fact, that these slimy creatures don't do a lot for real. If you're really going to use them for organic farming or something you need them in massive loads, crawling through your garden. I don't want my neighbors kids eating them off the curbs mistaken for spaghetti!
How was my lawn infested with these crawling noodles, you ask? I have two theories. One, the previous homeowners gifted this gift of negligence to us in an embryonic form and it just exploded as the worm season blossomed. I'm not throwing darts in the air here at them because the house had a bug issue that I solved! The carpets were infested, they had to be thrown away! Don't get me started. Second, maybe the manuring we had done a few weeks ago caused the earthworms. That's what the sales rep. at Lowe's got us thinking. Who knows? All I know is we had an infestation and there were HUGE earthworms crawling on the curb, rain or no rain.
I am NOT a garden person ... I may transform into one ... my mother is and she wanted these parasites dead! I did a little Googling and found out that Sevin is a wonderful pesticide, containing Carbaryl as the active ingredient, and it lands as a nuke bomb on earthworms!
We called our friendly gardener and he was awesome enough to spray it around for us. To prevent the worms from crawling out on our sidewalks, I did the very awesome Table Salt Treatment.
I was a pesky five-year-old when our cook used to do this to prevent earthworms from crawling into the house from our lawn. That was ages ago!
It turns out that my Line Of Control worked. The worms didn't cross it, woohoo! There was no need for me to get a flame gun out and become Jill Whitloy from The Night of The Creepers!

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