BugNite

In a childhood before the creation of video games, what did Steve turn to? Pest control, of course! In this episode, Steve details his past experiences with pest control and agriculture through family gardens and high school jobs.

Are you familiar with the game Fortnite? Even if you don’t know what it is, chances are you’ve seen the name or witnessed its cultural impact. Fortnite is a free-to-play, online game that drops you and 99 other players on an island in a winner-takes-all battle royale. The game spread like wildfire after its release and in less than two years has spawned myriad memes, dance moves, and phrases. Video games, like Fortnite, have been a huge part of pop culture for Gen-Xers, Millennials, , and now -Zers. Even Baby Boomers joined in the craze by buying the first widely-owned system, Atari. There is controversy about whether our interest in “gaming” a healthy habit is, but this phenomenon is clearly not going anywhere. When I was a kid there was no such thing as video games. No PCs,  no cell phones, and only three TV channels. But you know what? I really enjoyed my childhood and strangely enough some of that was because I got involved in pest control. I know that sounds weird but let me explain on this episode of POPagriculture!

Fortnite fans cosplay (image by Sergey Galyonkin from Raleigh, USA [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

I grew up in Southwest Denver, Colorado, during the 1950s in a neighborhood of “cookie cutter” three-bedroom houses, with families raising “baby boomers” like me. We all had nice green lawns to play on and that was my major exposure to plants, except for enjoying the forests in the nearby mountains. There were no farmers in my family line as far back as any of us knew, and there really weren’t any crops grown close by. I did get to help in my grandpa’s garden and that was really fun.

I didn’t get interested in agriculture until my undergraduate days, although I do remember seeing bumper stickers when I was in high school that said, “Don’t complain about farmers with your mouth full,” and I thought that made sense.

But of course, even as that young kid in our little suburban paradise, I did experience pests and sometimes decided to take action. There were lawn moths, which we sometimes called “millers,” and the feeding by their larvae (caterpillars) underground would create bare patches in our otherwise perfect lawns. I was into World War One airplanes, so I would pretend I was the pilot of a Fokker Triplane and would run around the yard with a badminton racket to have “dog fights” whenever a moth would fly up from the grass. I would swipe the racket through the air to “shoot down” the enemy (I know that the Fokker was the “enemy” plane, but gee, a triplane is even cooler than a biplane!). I don’t remember anyone commenting on this strange behavior. Anyway, this was something I did that is analogous to playing a video game – it’s just that I got some exercise in the process!

My sister and I in the front yard of our home in Denver.

There was a category of pest control that my dad asked me to do. We had about a four-foot-long translucent plastic tube that had a valve on the bottom that would release liquid from the tube when pressed down. It was designed to deliver a bit of herbicide and my instructions were to give it a poke to any dandelion plants in the lawn. I’m guessing the herbicide was 2,4-D which is safe for grass, but in a funny way I was ahead of my time doing “Precision Application,” which is now big in agriculture. The upside of this selective weed control was that it didn’t get applied to the clover in the lawn, and my sister liked to make “clover chains” from those flowers.

In my teen years, my first summer job was mowing lawns. I mowed ours as well as my grandparent’s lawn. I expanded my business to tending the lawns for several of the neighbors – particularly the older ones. It’s funny, but I can’t remember seeing a kid mowing the lawns in any of the neighborhoods in which I’ve lived for the past 25 years. I’ve included this mowing thing in my story because I later came to realize that mowing is a form of weed management. Most broadleaf weeds can’t survive in a mowed turf setting because their growing point gets cut off. Dandelions are the exception because they keep that meristem very low, under the reach of the blades.

The idea was to kill the dandelions before they set seed like this and spread all over the lawn.

I also had a bit of experience with vertebrate pests. There was a cherry tree growing right outside of my bedroom window and I really looked forward to that time each summer when we could pick some tree-ripe fruit. Of course, there were also birds that knew about the tree and would peck at some of the cherries, and the damaged cherries would rot. I would tie aluminum foil plates in the branches of the tree to scare them away. I wish I had known what I know now, which is that the methyl anthranilate chemical that gives Welch’s Grape Juice its distinctive flavor is a bird repellent. To a bird, it has the same ability to stimulate the trigeminal nerves that we get when we consume the capsaicin in hot peppers. Of course, I would have had to spray it every couple of days because that chemical is very volatile.

My grandparents around the time I was helping in their garden.

The other exposure I had to pests was in my beloved grandpa’s garden. He was a typesetter at the Rocky Mountain News and his dad was a mining engineering professor. He had no ag background; however, as a WWI vet he took the challenge to grow a “Victory Garden” seriously. The idea was that by gardening citizens could contribute to the WWII war effort. He was an early subscriber to “Organic Gardening Magazine” from the Rodale Institute. When he retired, he developed a passion for his garden, and I would help him tend to it. My Grandpa’s organic was focused on building soil health, what I still consider to be the important insight of the movement’s founders. His organic wasn’t about what you don’t do, but what you do. I don’t know if he used any “natural” pesticides, but I would help pick off caterpillars that would sometimes attack his garden.

I was aware of other kinds of pests. I don’t remember ever having issues with mice or rats, but we would sometimes have ant invasions that I would try to stop. We would sometimes get flights of grasshoppers and I would again pull out the badminton racket.  While I learned early on to be cautious where there might be a black widow spider, I knew that most spiders are beneficial. We did have to deal with mosquitoes and used Deet repellent, particularly on mountain hikes and camping trips.

When I was in high school, I was once a counselor at a Boy Scout summer camp. We stayed in cabins while the scouts were in tents. At night, large black beetles would be attracted to the light and come in through the gap under the door. We took some of the mimeograph fluid from the office (remember that foul smelling stuff?) and when a beetle ran in, one of us would douse it with a bit of the fluid and another would touch it with a burning match. That was definitely not a safe approach to pest control (kids, don’t try this at home!), but many of us Boy Scouts had pyromaniac tendencies. Fortunately, the cabin floor was concrete, and luckily, we never got caught.

So, that’s what I can remember about my interaction with pests growing up. As I often like to say, modifying a line from the movie, “The Princess Bride”, “Life means having to deal with pests, highness, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something.” 

I don’t know if these childhood experiences influenced my eventual path into the pest management arena, but maybe they set the stage. So, here I am around 50 years after being that kid in Denver. I still deal with pests in my garden, and I still work with clients who are creating ways to combat them for the benefit of all the world’s farmers. Living in Southern California, I don’t have a lawn because our water is too precious for me to justify watering one. I don’t even have a badminton racket. I never got into video games, but wouldn’t it be cool if someone developed one where you get to fly around and shoot down pests! They could call it “Battle Pests!”