Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 23, 1992 TAG: 9203210210
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As we have seen over the years, I'm not extremely fond of scritchy things, and this little book is full of them - and stuff you spray on them to kill them and so forth.
They even have scritchy things that kill other scritchy things.
And here we have this hit insect called the spined soldier bug.
What this bug from hell does is jump on things like cabbage loopers, cabbage worms and Mexican bean beetles.
Some of you want to look away momentarily as I describe how this works.
What they do is paralyze the other bug and then suck out all of its body fluids.
Why is it that I look ahead and see the day when these things will mutate or something and paralyze good old Farmer Brown and suck out all his body fluids?
Then they make a movie: "The Night of the Spined Soldier Bug," in which this thing paralyzes scantily clad women who look like Suzanne Somers, and, well, you know.
If you're interested, you buy them in units of 160 eggs, which are guaranteed to give you enough assassins to knock off more cabbage loopers than you ever knew about, pal.
That's $7.95 for 160 eggs, please.
You can get a trap for the cabbage looper for free if you buy a corn earworm trap, which seems a bit more humane and far less messy than fooling around with body fluids.
Incidentally, there also is a picture of a corn earworm that tends to make me scream every time I see it.
I will tell you now that I hate the picture of the codling moth in larva and adult stages. This is one ugly sucker, believe me.
And only its mother could like the European corn borer.
Not to mention blister beetles and squash bugs.
I don't want to seem ungrateful to the GARDENS ALIVE! people, but I'd have been happier if they hadn't told me all those things are out there.
I may never go outdoors again, which would, to be perfectly truthful, have some advantages. You can't mow grass if you stay indoors.
The catalog also has pictures of human being, with their body fluids obviously intact, doing outdoor things - spraying, tilling, composting.
None of them seems to have a whole lot of interest in these chores.
Are they worried about being attacked by a mutated spined soldier bug? Beats me.
Oh, I forgot to tell you about the fungus gnat, which is probably just as well.
by CNB