— Amy Stewart, “Wicked Bugs”

I spent Easter in Boston, visiting my grandchildren (and their parents). It was wonderful. Boston is way ahead of the Adirondacks, as far as spring goes. Day by day, I’ve watched tiny leaflets grow on the trees. Soon, my family won’t be able to see what the neighbors who live behind them are up to, not until fall comes and strips the leaves away again. There are daffodils and tulips and flowering apple, plum and cherry trees everywhere. We went to the Arboretum yesterday, which was a treat for me after a long winter.

Any day in April in the Adirondacks there is still the chance a person will wake up to snow, the soft, heavy kind that coats the trees and drips from the eaves. Corn snow? Sugar snow? Mashed potato snow? Take some pictures before it all melts. Any photograph you might take would be worthy of a place in an Adirondack calendar, or at least a few likes on FaceBook.

Don’t let this weather fool you. Spring is definitely in the works. Once again, I am tending my seedlings, tender, perishable little sprouts that demonstrate my capacity for hope and faith or my extreme gullibility and refusal to learn from experience.

Our growing season is so short way up North that we have to give our garden seeds a little head start, even though in the 34 years I have lived here Keene has warmed from a zone 3 to a zone 4 climate designation.

North Country gardeners love a challenge. The Adirondackers’ determination to raise heirloom tomatoes might be compared to Israel’s plan to make the desert bloom. One good thing about mud season in the Adirondacks is that the bugs are not yet out in force.

I have been entertaining myself with two books during these early spring days and evenings when I can’t garden. “Wicked Plants” and “Wicked Bugs,” are by the same author, Amy Stewart. She writes in a lighthearted way about the down side of the natural world we inhabit and gossips about the appalling habits and appetites of certain plants and creepy crawlies. At least through Stewart’s books I can vicariously experience the excitement of the out-of-doors even if spring is taking its own sweet time.

Did you know that houses where bats live can be infested with bat bugs, similar to bed bugs, after the bats leave?

This is one of the creatures Stewart gossips about in “Wicked Bugs,” letting us know that bat bug males engage in traumatic insemination, a mating practice that entails piercing the female’s abdomen to inject semen into her bloodstream. Sex-crazed males do the same to other males. These bugs cannot be studied under laboratory conditions where they are unable to hide from each other because eventually they are all perforated so much they die off.

Most of the really scary and venomous plants, insects and arachnids Stewart writes about live in Africa, Australia, South America and other southern climes, but some, notably midges (no-see-ums), mosquitoes, blackflies, poison ivy and some popular garden plants, are plentiful here.

In “Wicked Bugs,” she quotes a scientist, D. S. Kettle, as follows: “one midge is an entomological curiosity, a thousand can be hell!”

“Earthworms are not always as beneficial as people believe them to be,” Stewart hints darkly.

“Nobody loves a maggot,” she confides, and cautions “Flea vomit is the true culprit in a plague epidemic.”

“Wicked plants” is likewise full of lore and pithy observations. About the beautiful but invasive purple loosestrife, Stewart writes, “A single specimen…can produce over 2.5 million seeds in a season. Those seeds can live for 20 years before they sprout.”

Beware of poison ivy. Although not everyone is allergic to it, roughly half of all people will break out in a rash when they brush against the plant.

“Those sensitive to poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac will break out into an oozing, unbearable rash. Since the oils can persist in sleeping bags, on clothing and in the fur of adorable little dogs, you may not realize that you’ve been exposed until it’s too late…

“Someone who has experienced a severe poison ivy outbreak could be very sensitive to the rind of the mango fruit or other parts of the tree.”

Have a good week.

——

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)