Friday, September 10, 2004
I recently had occasion to buy three pints of nematodes. Those would be your beneficial nematodes (BN, as the box helpfully points out), the ones that allegedly eat the larvae of 260 kinds of garden pests. There are also parasitic nematodes that eat just about everything we eat before we can eat it.
How can you tell a beneficial nematode (BN) from a parasitic nematode (PN, presumably)? Well, it's hard because nematodes are microscopic. To the naked eye, they look a lot like dirt. They are also extremely numerous: It is estimated that four out of every five animals on the planet Earth are nematodes. So, basically, they could be anywhere. You yourself could be a nematode and not know it. Indeed, odds are you are.
(I should say, before we get on with our tale, that there is nematode songbook available at mgd.nacse.org/hyperSQL/squiggles/songs.html. Selections include "Piercing Along With the Root-Sucking Nematodes" and "Ghost Worms in the Sky.")
Now, we have in our garden a beetle of unknown provenance. Said beetle is eating the leaves of our ornamental flowering things. We are hoping that our BNs will take care of the beetle larvae because nothing else seems to, except chemicals that you would not want in your city, much less your garden.
Each pint container contains 7 million invisible nematodes. Three pint containers cost a mere $77. This is faith-based gardening at its most extreme.
There are other bits of evidence that the nematodes may just be a giant practical joke. The nematodes must be applied after sundown. They allegedly need time to burrow into the soil before deadly sunshine hits them. Oh, right. They could also be vampires. They do appear to have little fangs.
Peat moss is another thing you could probably make a quick killing on. It's sort of like dry dirt with strings in it. It ain't cheap either. So there we were, adding dirt to dirt by the light of the moon.
Dirt plus water equals mud. This, of course, is extra-special super- potent mud, but it's still mud. Then we crawled around on our hands and knees spreading the mud in our front garden. A neighbor strolled by on his evening constitutional.
"Warm night," he remarked, staring at us with unusual intensity. "Nematodes," I said. He backed away quickly. "Good luck or whatever," he called from across the street.
I almost yelled, "They're invisible," but I didn't want to become the crazy man in the green house who crawls in his garden at night tending his invisible pets. My reputation is shaky enough around here already. "Are you that guy?" the mail carrier asked me the other week. "I am," I said. "I thought so," he said. Once you've become "that guy," you better not start talking about your trained worms.
Later that night, Tracy and I stood together on the sidewalk. "Go, you little nematodes," said Tracy. "Dig deep into the soil and become safe! Munch on millions of delicious pest larvae!"
"Black vine weevils! Poplar clear-wing borers!" I had been reading the informative literature enclosed in the nematode box. "Sod webworms! White grubs! Wireworms! Consume them all, oh armies of the night!"
Yes, we're "that couple." Hide the children.
Just for you, because you are the first customer of the day, I can let you have these microscopic panaceas for 20 percent less than retail.
Their stylets were on fire and their spicules made of steel; their plasmids were fluorescent and pulsations he could feel. A bolt of fear went through jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
