Well, today's time in the garden was a mix of happiness and chagrin. The seedlings that I planted in my Goodwill pot on May 29 are already starting to come up. The really cool thing is that this morning, when I surveyed my kingdom, nothing was showing in that bed and now they are an inch tall! Rain is a wondrous thing!
After looking over my seedlings and inspecting everything else on the porch side of my garden, I moved over to the wall bed and noted that there were new tunnels under the pepper (but nothing else). I looked very closely and saw a few big black ants running around in the bed.
As a result of my ongoing battle with the scurvy little beasts inside the house, I have become something of an expert in ant psychology. I plugged the tunnels and watched. Soon the ants on the surface began to show signs of distress. When their distress turned to hysterics I knew that there was a nest down there!
I finally found it--in the roots of the pepper! I dug the pepper up and cleaned out the dirt around the roots. I also filled the hole in the bed with soil and drenched it.
The ants were crawling all over me carrying little bundles. Finally I got it all contained (pretty much) and replanted the pepper in a quarantine pot for the time being. I am hoping that it will recover from this catastrophe and grow into a fine plant with little psychological scarring. There are still lots of ants running amok on the bed, but I think that they will disperse when they have finally come to grips with the awful reality that the nest is no more.
Whew! what an adventure. I was thinking as I was re-potting the pepper that, when I was in Alaska, the definition of wildlife in the garden was deer, bears, porcupines, and the neighbor's dog. Here it is ants, huge mentally deficient carpenter bees, reptiles, and the neighbor's children.
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