Summertime
2012
The
roses in our backyard have survived more than fifty years of north
Idaho winters and bloomed for as many summers. Recently, though, I
noticed that a colony of aphids had invaded the new rosebuds on two
of the bushes. I dislike aphids and the damage they do, but I don’t
like to use pesticides in my garden. A dishwashing -soap-and-water
mixture in a spray bottle worked fairly well last summer, but I
recently read about another remedy that sounded even simpler.
A
Facebook friend posted enthusiastically about her banana-peel cure
for aphids. Aphids hate banana peels, she wrote. As soon as she
started using them on her rose bushes, the little green beasts
surrendered and decamped.
My
husband, Lee, eats a banana with his lunch on the weekends. So how
hard could this be? Last Saturday, I fished the banana peel out of
the kitchen trash bag and draped it across one of the infested rose
bushes. I wasn’t sure whether to drape it with the outer peel
facing the aphids, or the soft, inner peel nearest to them. Were
aphids smart enough to find the right side of the banana peel if I’d
guessed wrong? And hanging the peel across the tip of the rose stem,
where the aphids gathered, turned out to be tricky. The peel kept
dropping down onto the middle of the bush, where no rosebuds grew.
Would the aphid army be willing to travel downhill to land on the
banana peel?
Finally,
with patience and luck, I managed to hang the peel in the best
possible spot to trap those aphids. I called Lee away from the side
yard, where he was building me another raised garden bed, to admire
my latest example of horticultural genius. “Sweetheart, there’s a
banana peel hanging from that rose bush,” he said. When I explained
my strategy, he made an odd sound that might have been a cough, or a
smothered snort.
The
next day after church, I led him directly to the backyard to gloat
over the aphid graveyard. By then, the banana peel, now brown and
withered, had dropped a few feet and was dangling from a lower
branch. I picked it up, using two fingertips, because I didn’t want
to have to touch all those aphid corpses. But...there were no aphid
corpses, on the banana peel or lying in even a small heap at the base
of the rosebush. There were, however, dozens of aphids having brunch
on the rose buds.
When
my Facebook friend wrote about using banana peels ON her rosebushes,
I took her words literally. To an impetuous gardener, draping a used
banana peel on a plant sounds creative, rather than …eccentric. The
banana peel fiasco made a monkey out of me. If only I had done some
actual research before I started decking the rosebushes, I would have
read the following:
In
the roses forum of GardenWeb.com, a reader asked if
banana peels will eliminate aphids. The rose expert’s response:
“I think about the only way a banana
peel would eliminate aphids would be if you placed the aphids
on a flat surface and beat them with it.”
Reader’s
Digest’s online site, in an article titled “Eight Uses for
Bananas,” added further humiliating details: “Are
aphids attacking your rosebushes or other plants? Bury dried or
cut-up banana peels an inch or two deep around the base of the
aphid-prone plants, and soon the little suckers will pack up and
leave. Don’t use whole peels or the bananas themselves, though;
they tend to be viewed as tasty treats by raccoons, squirrels,
gophers, rabbits, and other animals, who will just dig them up.”
Bury
pieces of banana peels around the base of the bush. Don’t hang them
from your rosebushes. Who knew? I’m going to go find a banana tree
to climb now.
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