Year of the Plague (and I don't mean Covid-19)
A wall of our shed The summer of 2021 will go down in memory for us as creepy, disgusting and gross. Well – primarily June. Still waiting on the rest. Our area was totally infested with gypsy moth caterpillars – which I had heard of before but never truly experienced. Last year (2020) there had been some progress of them up one side of our lake, but we are at the north end, and here they were not too bad. That said, we were a tad grossed out last year too when the small bits that we were blowing off the front deck turned out to be “frass” which is lingo for caterpillar poop. We ended up taking down the tree that they had decided to live on (for a variety of reasons) and ultimately our front deck was poopless. Fast forward to 2021. The damned things were EVERYWHERE !! They start out very small and go through something like 5 or 6 moultings where they shed their outer layers. They end up about 3 cm long. ...