Figaro's Summer 2016 Fig Crop

As of August 1, the Summer 2016 Fig Crop is in jeopardy.  Up until last week, I had been seeing these huge beetles flying around our Tucson backyard.  However, for some reason I was not recognizing as beetles but as our amusing carpenter beetles just looking for a home for their next brood.  I must have been in denial or something.  Several days ago, as I was checking for newly ripened figs, I discovered that Figaro was being infested by the notorious and feared Tucson and Sonoran Desert gardener's nemesis, the FIG BEETLE  .  These guys are huge compared to my old New Jersey Japanese beetles.

These guys fly very slowly and bump into all sorts of things and structures.  While they may be very bad fliers, they are extremely efficient at gobbling up figs and leaving nothing but a limp, brown fig skin hanging from its stem.  They will crowd onto one fig to the point where you can not longer see the fig, just a mass of these green-black iridescent bugs all munching away.  Quite startling to discover as I am happily checking Figaro's branches and under leaves for ripened figs.  Eeek!  Yikes!  Yuk!

A quick Google search confirms my worst fears.  It has taken these guys 9 years to discover Figaro but they have.  Jim informs me that he noticed a few last year buzzing around the tree, but didn't want to alarm me.  Alarm me?!  If he had alarmed me, I might have been able to prevent this invasion this year.  A further Google search, reaped a few lame home remedies, plus Sevin insecticide and milky spore.

I was familiar with the use of milky spore from my gardening days in New Jersey for eradicating my lawn of Japanese beetle grubs.  It was pretty effective for years.  One application is often all that it needed.  Milky spore is not always easy to obtain, so I opted for Sevin for Figaro.  I bought a bag of granular  form and immediately went to town pouring into my trusty broadcasting lawn spreader and covered the entire backyard lawn, not just the Figaro's drip line area.  If any dead or semi-dead, squashed beetles were on the ground, they got an extra coating of the insecticide.  I hoped that all those beetles lurking overhead were paying attention and getting the message that they were not wanted here.  However, I feared they were up there laughing at me and rolling over in hysterics at my feeble human attempt to eradicate them.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Swamp Box?

Image
One thing you notice as soon as you start driving around Tucson is the many  beige-colored metal boxes  you see sitting on the roofs of houses all over town.   Some look pretty neglected and rusted out.   At first glance, you might mistake them for air conditioning units, and they are, sort of.   They are often referred to as “Swamp Boxes” by the locals.   A Swamp Box is what the heating and cooling industry calls an Evaporative Cooler.   It works much like a home humidifier.   The cooler contains a basin of water and a rotating drum with a foam pad.   Air is blown over the wet pad and into the house to produce cool moist air.   With an A/C unit, humidity is sucked out of the interior air in the cooling process, whereas with a swamp cooler humidity is blown into the interior air.   Since Tucson is a desert climate with very little humidity, for most of the warm season, an A/C unit is of little use.   The locals who have lived with their quirky swamp coolers since the 1960’s, like to
Read more

Desert Fruit

What distinguishes our Tucson home from all the rest in our post-WWII tract-home development are the two stately olive trees that grace our front yard. Our property is the only one in the neighborhood that retains its original curbside olive trees. When our development, and others just like it all over Tucson, were first built, its streets were lined with olive trees.  Over time, the trees died or were chopped down my homeowners who found the trees to be more of a nuisance than a distinctive shade tree.  The city of Tucson has since band the planting of fruit-bearing olive trees anywhere in the city.  Olive trees have a nasty habit of producing tremendous amounts of pollen and dropping huge numbers of olives all over sidewalks and streets. Believe me when I tell you that fallen olives will turn a sidewalk into a slippery purple-black mess. They are so bitter that the birds won't even eat them. People who come to the desert to get relief from their pollen allergies, have little appr
Read more

Figaro - Growing Figs in Tucson

Not long after settling into our new place in Tucson, I discovered a garden center just down the street that specialized in native plants.  Great!  I could now start learning how to identify and name all the local desert flora.  As I browsed the aisles and started noting names on the tags of the most interesting plants, I found my way over to the fruit tree section.  Just beyond the lemons, oranges, and grapefruit trees, I spotted an aisle of trees that looked surprisingly familiar. Could they be? Was it possible?  Was I really seeing rows of fig trees? Yes! They were truly fig trees. I had never expected to find fig trees growing in Tucson.  It was early September, and the figs were just beginning to ripen. Unfortunately, some trees were infested with fig beetles.  Fig beetles are gigantic iridescent purplish black things the size of a cockroach.  When they begin to feast on a fig, they swarm on that one precious fig until they are hanging from it like a bunch of deep purple grapes. 
Read more