Glurg. Glurg. Glurg.

When pouring water on fire ant mounds, that’s a good sound to hear as the water pours in an vanishes. That sound lets me know I’ve found the main chambers and passages. I haven’t heart that sound yet on the monster colony, but I did find one other lonely mound on the other side of the garden, which I’m pretty sure has now been eradicated.

The monster colony is huge. It has multiple mounds, and no doubt multiple queens. I have yet to find the main chambers and passages, so all I’ve been doing with the boiling water is killing off workers, eggs, and larva … by the thousands. When I went out yesterday morning to see if my previous attacks on them had done any good, they were bringing out their dead and putting them on piles around the mounds. For all the ant murder I committed, it didn’t seem to put too much of a dent in their numbers. I am not kidding when I say this colony is huge.

I am so against using poisons that are harmful to the environment in any way, but I have come to terms with the simple fact that I need something fast-acting and deadly, and I need it now. I have given myself permission to use whatever necessary to get this problem under control. Given my over-the-top allergic reaction to fire ant stings, it’s a matter of safety and survival. If they would have stayed in the far back yard, they could have gone on living their happy little any lives, but no … they had to invade my personal living space. Now they must die. All of them. Everywhere in the yard. I want them all gone.

Luckily, there aren’t any mounds in the garden proper or anywhere I plan to plant in the future, so I am free to use whatever deadly poison I wish. I won’t be broadcasting it broadly around the yard though. Just going to treat mounds as I find them, and smaller ones will continue to get the boiling water treatment, because doing so brings me some measure of evil joy. So today, poison will be bought and ants will die in the (hundreds of) thousands.

And hopefully the garden will dry out enough today that I can get out there and get Bed Two cleared out and planted. I am so late on doing this, but there hasn’t been anything I can do about it. It’s been too damn wet. I wanted my soil to hold water, and well, it does. The plants like it, but it does make it hard to do any tilling or turning of the dirt when it’s nothing but mud. But the bush beans have said they are done, the basil has been done for a while, and I have got to get the last few things planted before it gets too chilly out there. It may already be too late. I’m pressing forward anyway. It’ll be a learning experience.

Bed One is doing great though! All the plants look healthy and strong, and weeds have been at a minimum. I need to thin the arugula and stake the fava beans. Fall gardens grow so slowly though, it’s not nearly as exciting as a spring garden. Still, I started it, so I will finish it, and it will be nice to have some fresh homegrown veggies at some point in the distant future. The very distant future.

The cucumbers also look great, but even though they are flowering like crazy and have been for weeks, not a single cucumber to be found. I am extremely disappointed, and I don’t know that I will be devoting any space in the garden to cucumbers in the future. Maybe I’ll plant a few in large pots on the front stoop. Maybe not. After three tries at cucumbers and only three total cucumbers having been harvested, I am not inclined to want to mess with them again.

While the late planting of okra didn’t produce enough okra to eat, it did produce enough for seed. That was really the point anyway. I have a few more pods of seeds from the original seed batch, and it looks like I will have at least a couple of pods of second generation seeds as well. I’m going to have to do some research to discover what it is the okra is lacking in the garden, because every single plant has been stumpy and short. Not at all like the okra plants I remember from my youth.

And the potatoes? Four of the six starters have produced fine looking plants. One never sprouted, and one sprouted but looked so mutated I dug it up. These starters were from my first potato harvest, and there’s no way of telling what I will end up with in the end, but I’m fairly certain we will end up with edible potatoes of some sort. The potatoes are a long-term project anyway. Starting with a hybrid and pulling out the traits of the original parental lines that please me won’t happen quickly, but I do expect to be closer to my “perfect” potato when I plant again in the spring. Eventually, I will have small, round, white and thin-skinned, golden-fleshed potatoes with small eyes. It’s just going to take some time to get there.

The current joy of my garden –that volunteer tomato plant– is the healthiest tomato plant I have ever grown. The lesson here is that nature does just fine without any human intervention. After I have poisoned the ants, I hope to find enough good dirt lying around to fill one of my ten gallon pots and get that transplanted into something with room for roots. The old wagon isn’t going to be a good place for that precious plant once it gets larger and the nights get colder, and I would love to have a couple very late tomatoes and some seeds from whatever type of tomato so easily grows on its own.

Now you know why I haven’t been posting much the last few days! The weather has been beautiful, and I have been outside soaking it in and puttering in the yard. Sure, I haven’t been doing what I’d like to be doing –tilling the soil and planting seeds and pulling weeds– but once those damn fire ants are under control, I’ll be able to be out there doing whatever I like without fear of having to rush to the emergency room for epinephrine^†.

And now to get on with my day. There’s grocery shopping to be done, ants to massacre, and another beautiful day to enjoy being outdoors! It’s going to be another lovely fall day, and I better enjoy them while I can. Winter will eventually arrive, and then being outside isn’t going to be nearly as much fun.

1. † I really need to get an epipen. It’s going to cost me a hundred dollars or so to get one, and I’ve never had one in my life before, but the recent increase in fire ant activity has made me nervous enough to feel the need to have one. Did you know that the majority of people who have horrible reactions to bee stings are also just as allergic to fire ant bites? The reverse is also true. I’ve never been stung by a bee, but with a beekeeper living a few houses away and there being bees around all the time, I have begun to get nervous about eventually getting stung by a bee, and I don’t want to witness my reaction without an epipen handy. [↩]