As I sit here at my desk, a blue scrub jay is sitting on the garage door about five feet away, looking at me through the window. It watches me every day. So far, it is the only bird that has shown any interest in my hummingbird feeder I put out–except for one brown hummingbird that ate from it but hasn’t come back.

Even the smallest spot of nature is full of life. The other night, I saw an owl in my backyard. It flew quicker than any day bird I’ve seen. So I assumed that it was deer that were snapping the buds off of my rose bush in my garden plot. Then I went to trim the roses back to let in more sunlight in the garden, and I took a closer look:

What could be doing this to my roses? It didn’t take long to deduce it was this little sucker:

That is a rose weevil. It is a small red beetle that was covering the rose bushes. It sticks that pointy black snout into the buds of roses and sucks out their life in true disgusting parasite manner.

Naturally, I was upset. Next Sunday, weather permitting, I plan to plant the rest of my garden and here I have an epidemic of weevils. My garden is surrounded by large bushes, including two giant rose bushes at least 20 feet high, making them a perfect refuge for hundreds of rose weevils to breed undisturbed.

I’m a garden novice. I don’t know much about pest control. I have been killing aphids since March, and there always seem to be more–although it is getting a little better, I guess–so I hadn’t even had a chance to consider there might be other pests too. I looked on the Internet for organic methods to get rid of the rose weevils. It told me to hand pick the bugs and drown them. I tried it, shaking at least 50 rose weevils into a tub of water.

Big mistake. Watching bugs drown is awful. They climb on top of each other’s bodies to get air. Some of them panic and cling to each other, twirling around in the water in a circle of doom. If a twig or leaf falls in, they climb on and start helping each other up just like humans would.

Forget that crap. Sometimes you have to use pesticides. I sprayed the roses with weevil spray and haven’t seen a single weevil since. I don’t know if that was the best solution and I don’t like using pesticides, but I didn’t know what else to do. And since I haven’t even planted my garden yet except for some spinach and peas, the pesticide should be gone by the time I do.

This garden stuff is confusing, man.

In other news, my oregano (far away on the other side of the house away from the weevil spray) is going crazy.