The newly cleared path and scalped rosemary.

The job had been hanging over me for two years. Every time I went to trim the rosemary bushes by the side of the house, I found them being heavily used by insects and couldn’t bring myself to disturb them. I finally had to admit that there was never going to be a good time to prune them.

So this weekend, when I found I could no longer use the path between rosemary bushes and house, and the bushes were nearing two and a half metres tall, I decided it was time to prune.

Pruning the rosemary is never a fun job—the wood is hard as nails, and every branch seems to need a different size pruning tool than the last one. To make it worse, this time the job took twice as long as it might have, because I checked every branch for preying mantids and mantid egg cases.

I shifted six adult mantids to other plants and collected eleven egg cases by the time I was done. I’m sure I missed some, but I’ve tucked the egg cases into a cage to protect them over winter, and when they hatch out in springtime, I’ll release them back to the rosemary.

A bit geeky? Yeah, I suppose it is. But there was never any question about me being an entogeek. This way, I get my path back, and I get to keep my bugs. Everyone’s happy.