The Pest Protecting the Raspberries

The raspberries are in. The bushes are heavy with beautiful red, juicy berries.

And right underneath my raspberry bushes, under an innocent-looking pot, is a wasp nest (again).

Our garage is full of wasp traps. There are at least four in there.

But I never put them out.

There was a time when I cursed wasps. I wondered what the point of wasps was, and I came up empty. No point I could see.

So the obvious conclusion was to kill everything.

The Caterpillar Plague

Then I became a gardener.

I spent most of my life with a black thumb and no interest in plants. Why I started caring is a story for another day, but suffice it to say, gardening is a learned skill.

And one of the biggest problems of being a gardener is caterpillars.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re cute.

But not all caterpillars turn into butterflies.

The ones that turn into flies with red bellies can wipe out a currant bush in a day.

The tiny yellow-green ones in my chives crawl inside the hollow leaves and kill the plant from the inside.

And over the last few years, the leaf rollers have been the worst.

Leaf rollers are little green caterpillars that roll leaves into tube shapes full of sticky silk-like webs. They make leaves into nice little homes, and the trees often have to drop the tortured, twisted leaves early. They crawl up to baby fruit and take bites.

They affect everything from apple trees to raspberries to haskaps to birch trees. The raspberries have holes, and the birch trees are riddled with bare branches.

My city is full of leaf rollers. Trees everywhere with alarmingly bare branches and signature tube-shaped leaves.

Do you know what eats leaf rollers?

Wasps.

The Hunter Strikes

I was outside, trying to unroll some of the leaves on my apple tree.

When you do this, the leaf roller caterpillars will launch themselves out like bungee jumpers, hanging from a little silk thread. Waiting to crawl back in later, when you’ve left.

And as I watched, a wasp who had been buzzing around the tree flew up to the leaf I had just unrolled, and then flew down to the caterpillar hanging from the silk.

It paused to think for a second, as if curious why the leaf roller was here, and then grabbed the caterpillar with all of its arms and legs in a gentle embrace of death. Then it flew off with him, presumably to find a nice picnic location to eat him for dinner.

Bad Balances Bad In Ecosystems

This is significant for how we treat ecosystems, of course. We kill things that are a problem for us, not realizing that they actually prevent a much larger problem.

Wasps are inconvenient, but a serious leaf roller infestation over several years could take down 100-year-old trees.

I’m hesitant to get out those wasp traps this year because I know the reason we have so many of them. It’s because there are so many invasive caterpillars to eat. And if I want food and trees, I may have to coexist with the caterpillar hunters.

But this is also significant for how we treat the problems in our own lives.

Balancing Problems In Inner Life

Common advice is often to get rid of your problems. Identify the source of pain or tension or stress and remove it – like a leech. Or just accept it, resign yourself to the stress, give up.

But in real life, our attention, our stressors, our pain are often part of an ecosystem that sustains us. That’s why it’s so important to ask them what benefit they once had — the whole “invite them for tea” process. And then see if we can meet the need another way.

It’s really not a matter of getting rid of anything. Instead, it’s a matter of maintaining balance.

If there are too many leaf rollers or too many wasps, they start to kill other things — they kill my apple tree or sting my kids.

Likewise, if we have too much stress, too much sadness, too much giving, too much selflessness, too much discipline, too much responsibility, too much focus — any of these things can become a kind of disease in our emotional life. We need balance.

So the answer is not to get rid of one in favor of the other. It’s a question of how we balance these things against each other. And when.

Balancing Raspberry Wasps

In my yard, the wasps have been doing a great job of keeping the leaf roller population under control. There are several raspberries with little bites taken out of them, but much fewer than there would be if the hunters weren’t there guarding them.

Nonetheless, I’m not too excited to enrage the wasps while picking the berries. So now that my garden season is heading towards fall, I’m probably gonna have to take out the nest.

Probably with water. I don’t wanna kill everything, just reduce the population to keep it in balance.

Balancing Rogue Feelings

When my feelings are turning into pests, I try to do something like this:

Ask, where can I give them space in my life, and when?

• Sit with them for 20–30 minutes.

• Feel them.

• Ask them what they need.

• What are they protecting me from?

• What could I lose without that protection? When/where do I need it?

• Why are they important? What benefit do they have?

• Reassure them: I see the issue and can handle it now without their help.

And then look for the counter feeling.

• If it’s fear, I focus on love.

• If I don’t know what direction to go in, I look for what’s drawing my focus most.

• If there’s too much stress, I think about things that help me relax.

• If there’s too much sadness, I think about things that make me smile.

And then I do one small thing to right the balance.

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