Fred’s Garden is Taken Over by Caterpillars
March 12th 2008 21:00
To this day Fred isn’t sure what triggered an abundance of caterpillars in the garden he took care of as part of his job as a cleaner-cum-caretaker of the building I used to live in. It had been raining of course but when he turned up to work one day, he found dozens and dozens of green and orange caterpillars in the garden. Fred wondered what to do. My neighbour saw the caterpillars and suggested drowning them by sticking them into a bucket full of water and dishwashing liquid. Fred wanted to ask the gardener about them so he kept the dead bodies in the bucket, locked up in his toolshed. The problem was, after a few days with no sign of the gardener (he turned up sporadically), the toolshed was overcome with the stench of rotting caterpillars, which Fred said smelt like rotting cabbage. Fred threw the caterpillars out.
Luckily enough for caterpillar phobic me, I was at work when all this happened so if it wasn’t for the fact my neighbour and Fred told me what had happened, I would have been blissfully unaware of the situation. This also attests to how good a job Fred did in getting rid of them. Each day I came home, there was not a caterpillar in sight in the garden. Fred said they were about four inches long and, because of their unusual colour combination, stood out like a sore thumb.
It turned out one of the tenants in the building was interested in caterpillars so Fred flicked through his caterpillar books, trying to identify what species they were but he couldn’t find them. To this day, no one knows why the garden was taken over by green and orange caterpillars that day.
Luckily enough for caterpillar phobic me, I was at work when all this happened so if it wasn’t for the fact my neighbour and Fred told me what had happened, I would have been blissfully unaware of the situation. This also attests to how good a job Fred did in getting rid of them. Each day I came home, there was not a caterpillar in sight in the garden. Fred said they were about four inches long and, because of their unusual colour combination, stood out like a sore thumb.
It turned out one of the tenants in the building was interested in caterpillars so Fred flicked through his caterpillar books, trying to identify what species they were but he couldn’t find them. To this day, no one knows why the garden was taken over by green and orange caterpillars that day.
Photo by Super Rad! Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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