Thinking about the battle of the eggplant

Gardening is like life, in all the best and worst ways.

It’s been a really gorgeous spring in Indiana this year and I’ve been spending a lot of time in our garden. In our party pavilion, specifically, sitting on my lounger and reading or writing or, yes, sometimes napping.

There’s a moment in early spring when everything in the garden looks perfect or as close to perfect as it’s ever going to get. The ferns are so brilliant green you have to look twice to make sure they’re real. The leaves on coleus are neon bright. The tomatoes are full of blooms but not yet vining in that completely out-of-control way they’ll be doing by July. The spinach and arugula have no yet bolted in the heat. Everything is going so well for one single, solitary moment.

Even the eggplant, that most difficult of all vegetables, is doing okay. Yes, there are flea beetles, because there are always flea beetles. But this spring, I had a strategy and it was working. Being outside so much gives me the opportunity to truly micro-manage my plants. I spend a lot of time throughout the day going in and out, to refill my water (or cocktail, depending on the time of day) or get a snack or grab my notebook to do some al fresco writing. Every time I walk by the eggplant, I lean over and smash the flea beetles.

I have mixed feelings about this activity. I am, of course, killing things. I’m marginally a Buddhist and Buddhists are quite against the killing of things. All the things. We are a household that tries as much as possible to do no harm to creepy-crawlies. We rescue the mice our cats catch and put them outside, even though there’s a good chance they’ll come right back in. We let spiders be or if they’re just too big and hairy to comfortably live with, we catch them, too, and free them to the wild. Instead of trying to kill the wood bees that buzz around the party pavilion in the spring and fall, we put up a house for them. All this effort, but now I’m killing about a dozen flea beetles a day?

I feel mildly bad, but not bad enough to stop. A dozen flea beetles is hardly a dent in their population. They’re still feasting on my eggplant, just at a slightly slower rate. The situation with many pests in the garden is a slow war of attrition. If I can keep the flea beetles in check long enough for the eggplant to get established and start producing blooms, I’ve pretty much won. The plant’s healthy enough then to keep going. But there are years when the flea beetles have eaten the leaves down to sad, spiny threads.

And, honestly, the killing of the flea beetles is sort of satisfying. They’re fast. The ‘flea’ part of their name is accurate and about half of them successfully jump to safety as soon as I bend over. They’re fast, I’m slow. It’s a fair fight. Survival of the fittest and all that.

Plus, the easy way to go would be to just buy some Sevin, a chemical insecticide. If you want eggplants that are 100% free of flea beetles, this is your only option. I try to garden organically, but I’ve gone the Sevin route before out of sheer frustration. Dust it and be done.

I used Sevin mostly when I gardened at a distance, a plot at the community garden, and not in my backyard. And the truth is, the more time I spend in my backyard, the more intimate I become with the creatures there. The cardinal who will sometimes fly onto the back of the chair beside me when I’m very still. The sparrow who tried to pry the dead cucumber vine off the fence for its nest. The skinks (little lizards) who scurry by on the sidewalk or the wall that runs along the churchyard. Our tiny yard is full of fireflies in the early summer and I can’t help but think part of that is the lack of chemicals in our grass and soil. So killing the flea beetles is satisfying because, as gruesome as it is, it’s also at least natural.

And, as I said, I was winning the hard-fought battle of the flea beetles. Keeping them just enough under control for my eggplant to flourish. I had big plans for my bumper crop of eggplant, but nature laughs in the face of human plans.

This week, I started noticing bigger chunks of the eggplant leaves disappearing overnight. Not the tiny little holes the flea beetles make, but whole leaf sections missing. I might as well tell you now, I have no idea who this new enemy is.

The evidence

Hornworms? Cutworms? Potato beetles? Slugs? I don’t know. I can spot the flea beetles, tiny as they are. I haven’t yet discovered the new culprit. Diatomaceous earth doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. If I could find the pests, I could kill them, too. But they’re stealthy and they’re winning and I’ve become more than a little bit obsessed.

It is very hard to fight an enemy you don’t know and can’t see. Is it something living in the pine shavings I spread around the plants for mulch? I tried laying down a board beside the plants. If slugs are the culprit, they should have showed up underneath the board, but, nope. Nothing.

My health and livelihood are in no way tied to my ability to successfully raise eggplant and for this I am eternally grateful. As my friend and I are always saying, if we depended on our gardens to feed ourselves and our families, we’d be in big trouble. That humans did so for thousands of years is a little terrifying.

No one will die if my eggplant don’t produce, it’s just so goddam annoying. It’s 2022, after all. Haven’t we figured this out by now? How to keep my eggplant from being mysteriously devoured? How to stop people from being shot on a daily basis? How to let people control their own damn bodies? How to stop a stupid little virus from destroying our lives? What the hell, already?

I did successfully grow a cat, though

Gardening is like life, in all the best and worst ways. Every year the miracle of planting seeds astounds me. I put these tine specks in the ground and by some process I don’t even understand, a green things emerges. Sunflowers. Spinach. Beets. Dill. Mostly all they need are water and light and they grow. What a world in which this happens! In which the earth is so generous as to make this possible! What a miracle!

Then there are also the flea beetles and the new mysterious destroyer of eggplant. I can obsess all I want, but in the end, what will happen will happen. Gardening is a lesson in the control over the universe that you desperately want, but do not have. There will be eggplant or there won’t. Nature might be amused by my obsession, but mostly she’s indifferent. She has her own business to be about.

Anyway, there’s always the tomatoes, assuming some new pest doesn’t find them first.

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Thanks as always for reading and liking and commenting and sharing! Just two weeks away now from the release of the paperback of She/He/They/Me. Check out the amazing shout-out on this podcast, In Conversation, at about the 35 or 40 minute mark! You can still pre-order wherever you buy your books. Book events for this summer are in the works, so stay tuned. And mark your calendars for Tuesday, July 12 at 5:30, when I’ll be giving a talk at the Madison Jefferson County Library, When All Cheerleaders Were Boys: Sports and Gender Segregation.