Chiggers: Hate You
Every summer, a veritable cornucopia of natural vegetation springs forth from my backyard. I take particular pride in this, because like all great Americans, I purchased the garden (it came with the house).
A lot of what we have, I will sadly admit, cannot be eaten. We won’t focus on those girly plants today.
We have apple trees, raspberries, and a multi-tiered terrace in which my wife and I actually do work on each season. Asparagus, cucumbers, green and red peppers, anaheim peppers, basil, parsley, garlic chives and string beans are also mainstays.
I was always told that it was very hard to grow tomatoes. It is not. In fact, it is hard not to grow tomatoes. I learned this when we planted 5 or 6 tomato plants which collectively yielded about 75, 000 tomatoes (which, ironically, all tasted like sprinkler water…go figure).
See, I’m the romantic and my wife, she’s more of a pragmatist. I’m the guy who sits on the deck after a long dinner and waxes on and on about Tuscan villas and the beauty of eating things that grow from the ground, my wife is the one who goes to the garden store the next day and calls her mother over to actually do something in our backyard.
For the past few years, my wife has insisted on buying all of the extra plants just in case a few die. For whatever reason, I have not been able to convince my bride that we do not actually live on the prairie in these parts anymore, and should we fall victim to some sort of crop failure, pestilence or nuclear attack, we will still be able to survive by going to what is commonly known as the grocery store.
Anyway, one thing we have been able to do is keep the entire shebang organic – that is, pesticide and poison free – and according to the home’s former owner, it has been that way for about 17 years. It’s been a point of pride for me because I’m totally down with Mother Earth, ya dig?
But now, I want to nuke the entire yard.
I’ll explain. Last week, in one of those “see, look, I’m helping around the house” moments, I decided to weed the terrace that holds our crop of a single tomato plant (sometimes I get my way) and three pepper plants. In the five minutes or so of work that I did (and they say Americans don’t want to work in the fields!) I was summarily swarmed, eaten and digested by a gang of chiggers so fierce that I nearly lapsed into a coma. I have the waistline of John Merrick.
So for the past two days I have been tripping my face off on Benadryl and soliciting advice on how to rejoin humanity. Naturally, I turned to staff first.
I figured Grigsby would tell me to have a martini and forget about it. If I did that with the amount of Benadryl I’m on, this week’s paper would be out sometime next month. Besides, he seems more like a “if you’ve got an itch, scratch it” type.
Nancy Jack, little Miss outdoorsy type, was hardly more helpful.
“The only thing you want to do about chigger bites is scratch them,” she told me. “The main thing you should not do about chigger bites is scratch them. Some bargain, eh?”
Yes, I’d call that a bargain. The best I ever had.
Bringing it back to Parkville, what have we learned here folks? There aren’t any chiggers at the Farmer’s Market, open every Saturday and Wednesday for all of your fresh produce needs.