I do get nervous though when my bride started looking at the potted perennial plants. Our gardens, such as they are, are spoken for. So when she sprang for five largish pots of a dwarf day lily I knew we would have an (ahem) discussion over what part of the lawn would be dug up to make room for the new acquisitions. There was no question as to who would get the privilege of excavating 54-year old patch of grass and hardy weeds.
I finally prepared the square yard where they will go Sunday afternoon. The pots had been soaked overnight in an inverted garbage can lid to thoroughly saturate the soil. (The can itself seasons aquarium water.) I also noticed several rafts of mosquito eggs there between the pots and also in a Daphnia culture.
A clean 6-oz yogurt cup (clean because the Daphnia had eaten any residual yogurt) was selected and a tiny bit of that Daphnia culture water was included. The egg rafts look like pieces of charcoal, which had been scratched from a charred board with one's fingernails. Eight or nine of those rafts were caught on a finger and flicked into the cup. Some broke apart, but they all bobbed at the surface.
Such rafts may have roughly 80 to 120 egg capsules that at 80F/27C will soon be hatching into tiny, tiny mosquito larvae. It didn't hurt that the dollop of water was somewhat organically rich. (Mosquito larvae are air-breathers. What do they care that the water is a little ripe? That stuff is just food for them.)
The cup and harvest sat for a bit in the shade on a shelf. When it was taken in to the two batches of small fry, there were already maybe a hundred tiny hatched mosquito (or mossie) larvae. There would possibly be another thousand as the day went on. The fry had already had portions of flake dust from off of a flake food container and a little APR. But there are none of those larvae, smaller than bbs (newly hatched baby brine shrimp) left today.
And the mossies didn't hatch anywhere else so that they could grow up and bedevil those of us out in that yard. :)
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