Take a lesson from the ants

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Friday, 28 August 2009 16:18 |

Editorial

By LeRae Haynes

Unless you’re a gardener, you probably get sick and tired of hearing gardeners complain about the nearly insurmountable challenges they face in their quest to manipulate the plant world. Unless you’re a gardener, you probably think it seems like a lot more work than it’s worth. I mean, it’s a lot less work to march into the grocery store and buy a bag of potatoes.

If you are a gardener, though, you know the immense satisfaction that comes from a beautifully fragrant and colourful flowerbed at your house that blooms from spring through September, or a productive vegetable patch that not only feeds your family, but provides zucchini the size of Shetland ponies for all your neighbors.

Last year I whined about the cold, wet summer. I threatened to plant arctic rice paddies, ripped down my greenhouse in a fit of temper, and vowed to never let a garden trowel darken my doorway again.

Fat chance. I could no more resist planting a garden than I could enjoy bungee jumping in a tutu. So my vegetable garden went in again, and instead of last year’s underwater ice-crystal experiences, this year I was blessed with ants.

I don’t just mean 8 or 9 little ants that scurry industriously around on the sides of my garden boxes, I mean 8 or 9 hundred billion of them that built an underground complex, complete with two underground parking garages, a shopping mall and a Cineplex.

I think the Sahara-weather weeks we’ve had this summer encouraged their tenacity and their fertility. They seemed to multiply overnight and they became positively indestructible. A garden guru friend suggested trying things like corn meal, boiling water and Borax mixed with powdered sugar.

The corn meal, apparently irrestible to ants, is supposed to create a malignant thorax polenta colon bomb, and was instead greeted with a billion tiny ant cheers. ‘Hurrah! Let’s make tortillias!’ they shouted, and sent out ant text messages to all their friends: ‘Fresh corn bread and a salad bar in Frost Creek! Bring beer!’

I packed boiling water out to the garden and poured it onto the nearest thrashing mass of red ants, and was rewarded with more gleeful ant voices: ‘Finally! A hot tub!’ And when I hauled out a bucket of Borax mixed with powdered sugar and blitzed the Cineplex, they all mopped their floors and made cake.

Ants have been traditionally used to illustrate industry, hard work and determination. ‘Look at the ants,’ we were told when we were kids. ‘They work very hard, always do what they’re told and can carry 11,000 times their own body weight.’

Nobody ever said, ‘Look at the ants: they’re opportunistic, have iron-clad tenant agreements and can turn death threats into corn bread, a hot tub soak, and frosting on the cake.’

I did manage to grow two corn plants this year. They each produced a single ear of corn, prompting dinner table behaviour that bordered on the maniacal. I felt like Tiny Tim’s family at Christmas time, carefully cutting each teeny, sweet kernel in half to prolong the experience.

God bless us, every one, indeed. Especially the gardeners: we need it.