Unwanted visitors
By Felder Rushing
Got caulk? Between lady beetles crawling out of light fixtures and little ants trailing from who-knows-where to my kitchen honey jar, I’m awash in unwanted cabin critters.
Plus, there are little silken funnel spider webs in a potted plant and lizards that hitchhiked indoors in potting soil wandering down the hall looking for water. Oh, and an adorable baby possum that found its way through the pet door, nestled in a clothes pile.
Weirdest encounter was in my rustic cabin’s newly added room, made of recycled “pecky” cypress boards rescued from an old barn, when weeks later a big carpenter bee emerged, surprised to be indoors, from its nest hole in the soft wood.
You’d think I live in a wide-open menagerie in need of mosquito netting over the bed. But I guess I bring this on myself, having a garden designed to host as much flora and fauna as possible and still have room for me. And except for the lady beetles, which are not native and seek shelter indoors by the dozens (or more) in the fall, I can live with most of the critters - even a feisty little jumping spider that patrols my office window.
I have spent a lot of attention over the years to caulking around the outside windows, doors, roof soffits, and other entry points to keep roaches, white millipedes, spiders, and slugs out, though to be honest my garden’s tree frogs and its “lounge” of lizards, including skinks, color-shifting anoles, and night-feeding Mediterranean geckos have done an outstanding job of keeping them at bay.
My cottage style garden has lots of shelter, including dense shrubs with thick groundcovers, nectar-rich flowers nearly every day of the year, and a pile of logs and branches specifically for the native bees, lightning bugs, hoverflies, and others that need huddling out of sight. And I have water features and bird baths, so there are lots of other creatures outside living their best bug-eat-bug world, most of which thankfully never makes it indoors.
By the way, you may have come across alarmist articles about a dreadful “hammerhead” planarian - a long, flat creature that looks like a cross between a worm and a slug, with a small, shovel-shaped head, that allegedly wipes out earthworms and exudes a neurotoxin makes it deadly to handle. It is not new, been in the Southeast for over a century (I studied them in my Delta garden as a teenager), and is certainly creepy, and slimy, and if you cut one up it actually can grow a new tail and head. And it does excrete a toxin that can irritate skin.
But it eats mostly snails, slugs, and grubworms, and actually has very little impact on earthworm populations. No need to report finding one, or salt it to death, just don’t play with or eat it and everything will be just fine. Very sure of all this.
I do sometimes find the little black ants making safaris to find food and water. I admit to putting out bait stations near active ant safari trails, because there is no way to get to the usually well-hidden nest; instead, I trick the workers into taking the sugary bait back to the nest which usually clears up an infestation within a couple of days.
Anyway, there is only so much even critter lovers will tolerate indoors. Which is why we make the rounds with the caulk gun - but still keep a flyswatter, a broom and dustpan, a glass jar and piece of cardboard, and a hand-held vacuum handy, to catch and release what we can.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
