Last night we put up a post on Facebook asking 1. why did Brent look so upset, and 2. why was our Christmas tree in the front yard? With apologies to Tim Burton, ours was a little creepier than anything that happened in Christmas Town …
A few days ago, we walked out to our Christmas tree and there were literally hundreds of dead bugs underneath it. Small, spidery, leggy little things. We shook the tree a bit and some live ones started falling off. After sweeping them up, we did a little research and discovered they were cinara aphids, apparently a common pest on conifer trees in North Carolina. Ugh. The remedy was either hosing the tree down outside with water, insecticidal soap treatment, or just getting rid of the tree. We opted for the least invasive method that didn’t involve completely dismantling the tree.
We soaped them up with insecticidal soap (which is organic and harmless to humans, by the way). The little suckers had gotten everywhere, even in our curtains. We vacuumed up everything we could find (you can’t squish them because they leave a purple stain) and sprayed, sprayed, sprayed.
The next day they were still there, and we couldn’t take it anymore. We stripped the whole tree down, took it outside, and got rid of it. There were too many of them and obviously the soap hadn’t gotten to them all. We had to wipe all of the ornaments off by hand, because there were microscopic aphids on some of them .. and the feathery ones that we couldn’t certify free of bugs we just zipped into gallon bags to quarantine for next year.
Well, tree farms are SUPPOSED to check for these little buggers and treat them, so we were a little hesitant to go out and get another one. But, neither Anna or I have ever had issues with live trees before when we had them at home growing up, so we headed out to a local tree lot (not the same one as before, and no fun cutting-down adventure!) and got a new fraser fir. These are supposedly a bit more resistant than the other conifers. I’m sure the other tree purchasers wondered what kind of crazies we were as we dug into the depths of the tree inspecting it and crawling around on the ground before we bought it.
“I feel bad charging you for a tree when you’ve already had one”, the guy at the lot said. No kidding …
Well, the other tree came back home and is beautiful (we actually like it even more than our first one!). Our family came over and helped us clean all of the ornaments and set the new one up so we got it done in record time.
Here’s to no more nightmares before Christmas, and a merry time to all!
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