Thursday, July 30, 2020 Woe Has Come

It’s story time today. I have a true story that combines all the elements of a good novel: hope, despair, ruination, vengeance, death, rebirth, good guys, bad guys, and if we stretch it a little, maybe even a little romance. So here we go.

Once upon a time in the springtime of innocence, we planted two apple trees of very good stock and reputation. You know them as Honeycrisp and Zestar, both Minnesota hardy. As the years went by, we waited with eager anticipation for our first fruits to appear. And when they did, we rejoiced. There weren’t very many, but more would come in future years. We were confident…and a little naive.

The honeycrisp apples were often small and misshapen. Some years we didn’t get any at all. In the meantime, the Zestar could crank them out, but lots of them fell early and the rest became food for birds, squirrels and/or raccoons. We never caught any of these creatures in the act, but this isn’t really defamation of character, so I freely malign them without proof. They’d take one bite and throw them down on the lawn. I made lots of apple sauce and apple butter. It was time to start taking this whole business more seriously.

We attended a talk about growing apples at the state fair one year and picked up some good information. It turns out you really have to thin them out severely. It isn’t just a suggestion; in fact, the Honeycrisp won’t produce any apples at all in the next year if you haven’t sufficiently thinned them. The best way to prevent pestilence and disease is to spray them, so we (and by “we” I mean my husband) began spraying them. Oh, don’t be so shocked – I never said we were purists.

This was the year, the golden year, when everything was going along according to plan. We thinned the apples early and often. We sprayed on schedule. The trees and their apples had never looked better. In the movie version of this, the menacing music starts playing. You know what comes next: THE EVIL JAPANESE BEETLE INVASION.

The beetles loved our apple leaves and made beautiful skeletons out of them.

In an impressively short time, our trees were shadows of their former selves and this had aroused our ire. I wrote of this in a previous post with my proclamation of “woe to the Japanese beetles.” See: Woe To the Japanese Beetles

It might seem like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, but we had to do something, so Kris put out a trap for the army of invaders, a pheromone trap (romance, right?). It was love at first smell and they’ve been coming to our trap in droves. Oh, sweet vengeance. Woe has come. No pity, no regrets (well, except that we should have done it earlier). I hope that doesn’t sound too callous.

There’s nary a beetle on the decimated trees now and some of the apples are hanging in there, so maybe we’ll have a crop after all. And in response to the devastation, the trees are putting out new leaves, a resurrection worthy of great songs and celebrations.

The apple tree has been brought low
Its leaves have been eaten as plunder.
But the morning after its nighttime of woe
Green leaves reappeared, to our wonder.

The memory of that awful invasion
Shall soon be completely forgot.
And the beetles of origin Asian
All lovesick in our compost shall rot.

That was off the cuff, but you get the idea. Happy ending, we hope!

I’ll probably delete a bucket of dead beetles in the morning.