One of the glories of Sullivan County in June is that everything, everywhere is rioting in green or, if not yet green, is ablaze with bloom. Drive down Creamery Road or stroll around Mountain Lake and you’ll already have seen yellow explosions of forsythia, white and pink of cherry blossoms, and now heaping mounds of purple rhododendra. Just the last day or so, driving around the County with my arm out the window and air chugging in my ears, I smelled the intoxicating fragrance of our ditch rose, rosa rugosa. What a blessing!

Today I finished treating my lawn against that bane of many local gardeners—no, not the damn deer!—Japanese beetles. These insects’ grubs, which burrow down about eight inches under the grass in the colder months, are now stealthily moving up toward the surface where they will emerge in about a month’s time as quite beautiful purple-and-green scarab-like beetles. Beautiful the beetles may be but they devour and destroy most anything green in their path. To suppress the beetles this year I applied milky spore this morning across the whole 1/3 acre of my property. Milky spore is a kind of fungus which over time infects and kills the grubs while leaving animals and humans untouched. The heavier the infestation of grubs/beetles, the quicker the milky spore gets to work on the critters, spreading from one grub to the next. To be fully effective, a lawn must be treated at least three times: spring, summer, and fall. Another application of the spore granules will go down in the autumn and yet another one next spring, by which time the Japanese beetle population on my property should be starting to dwindle.

To another critter of concern. Word is that the tick population has exploded after the mild and largely snowless winter of 2023-24. Take it from someone who took every precaution about these parasites but still came down with Lyme Disease: everyone should be concerned for themselves, their families, and friends from now on. I tell everyone who chats me up in Sticky Fingers that the new “getting ready for bed” protocol includes washing one’s face, brushing one’s teeth, and checking one’s nooks and crannies for the presence of ticks (typical hiding spots: between the toes, behind the knees, in the armpits and navel, waistline, behind & inside the ears, hairline of the scalp). Tick and tick disease abatement will necessarily become a part of our reaction to climate change hereabouts. I even think the Bethel Comprehensive Plan should formally include tick abatement and mitigation as part of the Plan. It’s as if a kind of Covid carrier had come back into our territory and is here to stay. Public planning needs to take account of this increasing but still largely silent threat to public health. High time that everyone who even walks through their yard begin to include the tick protocol before bed to eliminate the possibility that one of the little bloodsuckers has sunk his mouth parts into a tender part of you of which you are barely aware …

Joan McDonald from the Club at Smallwood contacted me this week to inform me that the Club is turning 70 years old this year and lots of celebrations are planned. That’s quite an achievement for a self-regulating vestige of the Borscht Belt whose very diverse 160+ member families get together for only July and August each year! The lovely Club House, reclining on a green lawn set well back from Sgt. Brucher Road, nowadays boasts a sports complex and a sparkling heated pool. As was the case for the past 70 summers, a full complement of activities is planned by the all-volunteer team including various classes and movie nights, pickleball, basketball, volleyball and pingpong. And then there are the dinners with festive music and dancing!!! Very Borscht Belt, indeed. The Club has also started up the Kidz Klub with parent-supervised activities such as Wii, Air Hockey, Foozball, and arts and crafts activities. For more info, including how to join the Club, please visit the Club’s website at theclubatsmallwood.org. 

One final reminder: membership dues are due BY June 15th for renewing members of the Smallwood Civic Association. Avoid a late fee, and renew your membership to this amazing organization before 6/15. Friends, see you soon!