There's a conflict raging in our gardens. Particularly in the backyard. For the past several summer seasons we've experienced raiding parties of Japanese beetles. Oh, not our backyards alone certainly; our neighbours too have witnessed an influx of these raiders. They are nothing if not voracious. True, they are also beautiful little beetles, but they increase their numbers exponentially in no time at all when their appetites have been satiated.

And they're more than adequately satiated, feeding off the flowering plants in our gardens. Not just the perennial flowering and annual plants, however. Our prize corkscrew hazel tree's foliage has been utterly ransacked, it looks forlorn and beaten. And that's how we feel about this brazen, unstoppable carnage.

So far, the score is garden zil, beetles skyhigh command of all they survey. Perhaps not quite all, since they have their preferences; there are plants they are disinterested in, thank heavens, and others that they descend upon in hungry swarms, to destroy. The integrity of the garden has been challenged. As in previous years, we've decided they're living creatures and we'd leave them to it.

This morning, their predations quite got to me. So I took a spray bottle and filled it with baking soda, dishwashing soap (insecticidal soap is recommended; I don't happen to have any), cooking oil, vinegar and topped it all off with water. I measured the baking soda and soap, oil and vinegar in a tsp.each, and filled the spray bottle to the top with water. And then proceeded to spray. Mostly an old, productive rose shrub whose leaves now resemble lace.

This is what healthy, non-beetle-predation rose foliage looks like; one they've overlooked.

An inspection at close range of the beetles ensconced on the plants will reveal that among the throngs there are pairs copulating. Thus producing even greater numbers. They truly do seem unstoppable. When they've destroyed as much as they mean to, we've noted that in a month or so they gradually diminish in numbers, obviously going on elsewhere; not to a neighbour's gardens but elsewhere as in returning from whence they came wherever that may be, unless it's really a group life-span in a seasonal phenomenon, for all we know.

They've chewed enthusiastically on the New Guinea impatiens, so they got sprayed as well as the affected rose shrubs, though there is one they appear to have overlooked. Things get strange and stranger....

They really enjoyed raiding the bergamots and they look quite ragged now, though that's an expression as well of their life-span. Since they're the favourites of bees (it's why they're also called bee's balm), I did not, of course spray the bergamots, despite the presence of beetles on them, since they're outnumbered by the hovering bees and I don't intend to discourage or worse yet, harm them.

The bees are swift, difficult to capture in a photo; this is one at bottom-right

While I was at it, I boiled several kettles-full of water, took them out to the cobbled walkway at the side door and gave some really intractable weeds a steaming bath, to get rid of them, since just pulling them out hasn't proven to be sufficiently influential on their presence. We'll see what comes of that, too. It has been a tried-and-true method.