2004-06-09 1:38 PM
Night of 3,000 Ladybugs
At 11 PM on Saturday night, I was in my dark, cold garden, intently watching the movements of 3,000 tiny, sleepy ladybugs. And how was your evening?
So on Saturday night, TheBoy, Sweetcheeks and Turtledove, the parents and I went to a nice restaurant for my birthday dinner (the big day was yesterday, and thank you A's for finally winning a freaking game while I'm in the stadium for the first time all damn season). After eating dinner, doing presents and keeping the wedding talk down to a dull roar (to the relief of my brother, who seems sick of talking about it already less than a week into the engagement), Mom had one more package for me -- 1,500 ladybugs, in a half-pint cardboard container. The problem is, I'd already bought another 1,500 ladybugs, which were hanging in a little plastic mesh bag in my laundry room.
Ever since an aphid jumped on my arm while I was weeding the tomatoes (I swear I heard it give me a tiny raspberry), I'd been on the lookout for ladybugs. There wasn't a ladybug to be had in the Bay Area, said the nursery, and the suppliers just couldn't raise them fast enough.
But now the ladybug drought had turned into a ladybug flood, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. The ladybugs my mother had found had been kept in a refrigerator(!) at the nursery she'd bought them from, but I didn't feel right sticking them back in the fridge. What if thawing them out and then chilling them again was bad for them? What if they got knocked over or got loose? What if they couldn't take the smell?
So the only thing to do, it seemed, was to turn all 3,000 loose at once. Maybe they'd play out tiny ladybug dramas of love and war and longing right there in my garden. Maybe they'd come through (unlike the mariachis) and have a ladybug danceoff/knife fight on the leaves of my tomato plants. At the very least El Suburb's ladybug population would be boosted by the influx of newcomers.
So at 11:00 that night, which isn't exactly dusk but seemed better than waiting an extra day or, God forbid, getting up at sunrise, I turned the little teams loose, one on each side of the tomato plants. By morning it was a veritable ladybug party, with clusters of them hanging out on the end of the trellis, clumping up on the smallest tomato leaf they could find and chatting it up on the redwood planter.
By nightfall, though, the party was over and most of the ladybugs had taken off. As of this morning there were only two left.
Maybe next time I'll have an open bar.