My family and I visited my father-in-law over father's day weekend. We went to his cabin and spent some time fishing his pond, and riding his golf cart around, it was a great time with all five of my children, all of them caught some fish. The bream fishing was slow and we drowned more crickets than we should have but we had a great time. Lesson learned, when taking five children fishing, don't even think about fishing yourself. I was constantly either untangling lines, re-baiting hooks, removing fish from hooks, or untangling lines.
There are many reasons I do not like the summer woods, chiggers, mosquitoes, spider webs, humidity and mostly TICKS. I hate ticks, especially the small deer ticks that you cannot ever see! Of all of the things in nature, ticks give me the ibby-jeebies more than anything else. Luckily we did not get any ticks last weekend, but we made up for it in chiggers. When we got home and discovered that all of us are covered up with chiggers! If you are not familiar with chiggers you have not spent much time in the summer woods in the south. Locals refer to them as "red bugs" all I know is that they itch! My youngest son is covered up in areas that should not be covered up! His sisters are also covered up. My wife spent almost an hour last night "painting" them. The local remedy is to use fingernail polish and paint it over the chiggers to smother them so they will die, in the process we scratch, and scratch.
This is the greatest threat to the blackberry harvest, the blackberry's are almost ready, and the standard around here is 3 chiggers for every berry! We have to cover ourselves with deet to prevent the invasion, for some reason chiggers love blackberry patches, and so do we, we don haz-mat suits with our long sleeves, and long pants, spray every inch of our clothes and our hands, and pick berry's, seldom are we totally successful in eliminating the chiggers but the sacrifice for ripe blackberry's is usually worth it.
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