Around the north side of our house it gets really wet. It’s in the shade pretty much all day, it’s got a couple of air conditioners shading it too. And we have to use the sprinklers on it because that section also waters our rose bushes et. al. along the side of the house. Not to mention that our air conditioners drain out of there too and I think the neighbors also water our side of the house. So it’s wet, and it stays wet, and it doesn’t really drain away.
This is no good for us home dwellers because the things that like to live around all that moisture are bugs. Lots of ‘em. I noticed the wasps first because of course you notice wasps because they’re crazy. But when exploring over there I’m always getting bit by mosquitoes and seeing other critters crawling around. The water forms into pools and will just sit there, not draining, for days. Definitely a small, but consistent, bug breeding area. So it’s got to go.
Our plan was to just cover much of that area between the A/C units, which is already ugly, with gravel. There still may be some water in there, but as long as it’s hard to get to we, hopefully, won’t have to worry about mosquitoes breeding next to our house. So we got some bricks to form a little barrier and several bags of gravel and one evening after the sun had started to set and let the temperature get down below 90 degrees, we struck.
Most of the work involved was just getting the rocks over there. Jess did the bricks, so I got to do the massive bags of gravel. (Okay, she did cary one, I just had to lift it up for her). Then we blocked off the area with the bricks and started covering up all the muddy, standing-water area with gravel. It seemed to work really well, giving good ground cover and looking pretty nice. And then we saw the frogs.
I felt a little bad, actually. A little brown frog and an even littler brown frog had evidently taken up residence in this micro-swamp, and we were just coming in like humans always do and paving over his home. They hopped away and Jess managed to grab one and relocate it to a drier area of the house, but I doubt he’ll stay. I did feel bad, and then I remembered why I was doing it. Mosquitoes and wasps and who knows what else? It’s not good for us to be having those things breeding near our home. That’s how diseases get spread.
Of course, it’s always nice to leave little pockets of ‘nature’ around: our native flowers, parks and nearby undeveloped (for now) areas. But let’s not kid ourselves. If you want to have nature, real nature, you’re going to have bugs. And a lot of them. And things eating those bugs and those bugs attacking you and trying to eat your food. We tend to romanticize ‘living in tune with nature’, but nature isn’t kind. Everything is trying to eat everything else, and the only reason we’ve become so successful as a species is because we’re the best at the war. The best. We can take any place and make it sterile and safe.
Clearly there’s a balance that needs be struck: if we really tried to win the war we’d just end up wiping out every other species on the planet and killing ourselves off for lack of biodiversity. That’s not healthy either. But sometimes you have to chase away the cute little frogs because you can’t have mosquitoes living near your house. So I felt a little bad that I couldn’t carve out that area for critters to live, but that’s the choice I had to make today. Maybe someday later I’ll be able to make a little pond way, *way* out away from the house where there can be bugs and cockroaches and frogs and snakes and deer and all sorts of crazy animals just eating each other like there’s no tomorrow. But not today.
I just had to make sure my house was safe.
-N
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