Biological Warfare

We have the ugliest backyard ever.

For some people, like my husband, this isn't a problem. But then, my husband didn't spend his formative years reading Sunset magazine and Better Homes & Gardens. He didn't grow up believing that the patch of ground outside your house (yes, even a rental) should express your personality.

But I did. And right now, our backyard is expressing the personality of someone with clinical depression.

The problem is that, despite the facts that it's springtime, we live in Maine, and we're getting rained on just about every other day, huge patches of our lawn are bare, depressing dirt. Dirt filled with lots of really gross, white grubs.

A little reading in my stack of organic gardening books suggests that these grubs are Japanese beetle larvae (another bad thing for the old garden) and that an effective, organic way to get rid of them is to use Milky Spores. Yum, right?

Milky Spores are apparently little grub-targeting viruses that will infect the grub, slow it down, presumably make it even more gross, and then kill it, releasing thousands of new spores to infect the survivors. Kind of like creating a grub-zombie-apocalypse in my backyard.

My response? HELL YEAH!

I ordered a vat of the grub-zombification-juice. At $27.99, it's a little pricey (it's also $27.99 over our garden budget of $0.00), but it will be worth it to know there are thousands of grubs dying horrible deaths right under our feet.

Ah, gardening! Before I had a garden (when I was 13 and reading Better Homes & Gardens) I pictured only bucolic splendor - singing with the birds, picking the flowers, living in harmony with nature. Especially in an organic garden!

But it turns out the reality is a little more complicated. Organic gardening is more like trading a few punches with nature, or trying to wrestle an agreement out of the most uncooperative co-worker imaginable.

Ok, Nature - you got me with the grubs. And the frost. And whatever's killing my eggplant sprouts. But let's see if we can't work together with this Milky Spores thing and bring a little grass back to this dirt patch of a backyard.