“I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain,
“Comin’ down a sunny day”
— “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,”
Creedence Clearwater Revival
So much for expecting a dry, parched summer — but it ain’t over yet. To paraphrase a well-known quote by famed sports writer Dan Cook, the fat lady hasn’t sung — a reference to the 1870 opera “Brunhilde,” when the rather hefty soprano sang for 20 minutes to close the production. I lost count at about 12 inches of rain last week at Chaos. We missed the brunt of the weekend’s storms here on the “I-44 corridor,” as local meteorologist Doug Heady puts it, but much of our area got a lot of wind and hail with storm damage and flooding downstream.
The garden is suffused with a green luminosity, trees soaking up every precious raindrop against what may lie ahead. Early summer flowers tumble over each other in haste to bloom, butterflies and bees vie for nectar and pollen, and plants are quickly outgrowing damage from anything eating them. But just because we are growing moss between our toes, my hair has a tinge of algae green and weeds are multiplying faster than a cage of gerbils, that doesn’t mean it will last, though there is always hope for a temperate summer free of dragging hoses.
So what’s bugging me then? With the rain came pesky tiger mosquitoes, loving that damp, excess vegetation to breed in, along with pooling water. Local bats and dragonflies are keeping up pretty well, and I’m fine with that — OK, I’m not fine, but I can tolerate it — but the cause of most of my cursing occurs when I find one of those oh-so-itchy poppy seed-size seed ticks on some part of my anatomy I can’t reach without mirrors and contortion.
The idea that a cold winter will kill off ticks, chiggers or any other bugs is mostly wishful thinking. It would have to get a whole lot colder for a lot longer. Even in Vermont’s often frigid Arctic winters, ticks are abundant. Typically dormant in winter, ticks hunker down below leafy litter where they are protected from intense cold, and their bodies manufacture a chemical like antifreeze. They wake up hungry when temperatures are above 35 degrees. A human or animal walking in the woods on a mild winter day will alert ticks that a meal is serving itself, and we find ourselves picking ticks off dogs and our bodies in January, wondering how the heck that is happening. In a possible life span of two years, ticks may not be dormant at all, finding mice and deer to be excellent habitat. In spring, female ticks lay eggs that hatch into those dot-size larvae. Unfortunately, as the climate warms and seasons lengthen, ticks are becoming more active year-round. Heat, however, can be fatal for ticks, so a long, hard, dry summer like last year’s might slow them down but not stop them, as this spring’s huge resurgence shows.
The bad news concerns the increasing prevalence of Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks. In findings from a recent study by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, ticks carrying Lyme disease microbes have an 80% survival rate over a very cold winter, compared with a 40% for ticks not carrying Lyme disease. I won’t discuss the dozens of other pathogens they carry, but it is vital to remove ticks within the first 24 hours of having been bitten. If a bite develops a red ring around it, get immediately tested and treated for Lyme and other diseases.
There is little we can do to keep ticks out of the garden if we are to have plants and not boring, manicured, golf-course landscapes. They have been on Earth long enough to have fed on dinosaur blood and are still as persistent as politicians running for office. Keeping mammals such as deer, mice and birds out has been suggested, but that is not realistic. Neither, though I’ve briefly considered it, are guinea fowl, with their loud alarm calls and tendency to roost in trees — prey for owls and hawks. The use of insecticide on lawn and gardens is completely off the table. Ants, centipedes, spiders, beetles, birds, lizards, salamanders and other small animals prey on chiggers, and using chemicals also kills these natural controls.
Repellents containing DEET are the most efficient at keeping ticks at bay, though not recommended for everyday use. Safer herbal and natural repellents in place of DEET include peppermint, lavender, citronella, thyme, monarda, mountain mint and other strongly scented herbs, but they may not be as effective and need reapplied often. And yes, ticks have a “sense” of smell. No noses, but sensory organs on their forelegs detect chemicals in odors to locate their prey.
I’ll definitely be taking a shower before I go out. And one after, in case a tick or two thought I wasn’t minty-sweet enough.
Sandy and Jim Parrill garden at Chaos, their acre of the Ozarks in Joplin. Sandy is a lifelong gardener, Missouri master gardener and winner of the Missouri Writers Guild 2018 first-place award for best newspaper column. Jim is a former garden center owner and landscaper; both are past members of the Missouri Landscape and Nursery Association. Email them at sandraparrill@sbcglobal.net and follow their Facebook page, A Parrillel Universe of Wonderful Things.