It came as a bit of a surprise when Miss Mattie and Scooter Mouse were announced as speakers at a Pike County Master Gardener seminar on garden pests. After all, some people consider mice to be that very thing.
Master Gardener president Diane Nobles explained why Scooter would be the ideal authority on the subject. “It takes one to know one,” she said.
As it turned out, Scooter wasn’t able to make it anyway.
“He had to stay and run the library,” Miss Mattie said.
Miss Mattie Rials is, of course, longtime children’s librarian for the Pike-Amite-Walthall Library System, and she is also Scooter’s handler.
She also knows quite a bit about plants. And what she doesn’t know, she can learn from books at the library.
As examples, she brought “Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening” and “10,000 Garden Questions” to the county fairgrounds meeting room for Tuesday’s seminar, which was the last of four.
What’s not in books can be found in the library’s computers or magazine section, Miss Mattie said.
“We just had a lovely area of free coffee open up,” she said, describing it as a project of Friends of the Library. “You can sit there and have a cup of coffee and read a magazine.”
She held up a copy of a Martha Stewart’s “Living” magazine as an example.
Getting down to business
As for garden pests, Miss Mattie has a definite opinion.
“Squirrels are the No. 1 pest in a person’s garden,” she declared.
That very morning a squirrel had dug up all around a new azalea bush at her house, apparently burying acorns.
Miss Mattie went on to more conventional garden pests, like aphids.
“Aphids suck the life out of a plant. You can almost hear them go. ...” She made a sucking noise, presumably the actual sound the tiny insects make.
Aphids produce a sticky substance known as honeydew that turns into “old black soot,” she said.
Hummingbirds eat aphids “like chocolate candy,” she said.
Miss Mattie passed around some printouts on pesticides from the Mississippi State University Extension Service, though she disavowed knowledge of the technicalities.
“When I was spraying, I made real good friends at the co-op,” she said.
Ladybugs also eat aphids, and Miss Mattie recalled the time many years ago — “when my hair had color” — that the “government” released ladybugs in the Homochitto National Forest near Crosby.
The bugs swarmed around Crosby Library, and one time when Miss Mattie was leading a storyhour, a child held up a finger and said, “Look, a ladybug!”
That brought storyhour to a halt.
Miss Mattie moved on to lacebugs, which attack azaleas. Getting rid of them involves spraying not only the plant but the ground around it.
That led an audience member (a newspaper reporter) to point out that deer eat the leaves of young azaleas. On the other hand, Nobles pointed out that azaleas are toxic to livestock.
The lowdown on hornworms
Miss Mattie turned the talk to hornworms, the big, green, devil-horned larvae that strip tomato leaves.
The remedy is “pick ’em and smush ’em,” Miss Mattie said.
She claimed the horns won’t hurt when touched, though they look scary enough to prompt prudent gardeners to wear gloves.
Nobles said gardeners can plant basil around tomato plants. The tomato leaves protect the shade-loving herb, which in turn wards off hornworms.
Chinch bugs were next on Miss Mattie’s list, and she recalled the time her St. Augustine grass developed big yellow circles. She said you can dig up a small plug and see the bugs, which should be treated with Sevin dust.
Miss Mattie figures the bugs got her grass because she was “prideful” of it, and “pride goes before a fall.” That’s also why the squirrel targeted her azalea, she said — she was prideful of it, too.
When her speech ended, Miss Mattie presented Nobles with a sealed jar that she said Scooter Mouse had filled with “March wind.”
She also gave away a big metal ladybug as one of the door prizes — another gift from Scooter.
The mouse even sent Miss Mattie with a bunch of pet rocks to distribute to everybody — proving that mice aren’t necessarily pests to gardeners after all.
