I am starting a cricket farm. Yes. A cricket farm. Mambo is eating me out of house and home, and I am obliged to find a way to pay for his cricket habit. Either I need to get a second job, or raise the little suckers myself. So, cricket farming it is.
Here's what you need to farm crickets: a big plastic tub, a dish of dirt, some wet cotton balls, some raw veggies, and a heating pad. Oh, and a bunch of crickets.
The crickets and all their stuff go into the big tub (into the lid of which you have drilled holes so they get some air). The heating pad goes on top to keep them nice and mosty toasty. The dirt is for laying eggs in. You put it all together and listen to the chirping and wait. Hopefully in another week or two I'll have little crickets. In the meantime, I have a nice evening chorus in my living room. It's like camping.
If someone had suggested to me a few months ago that I would be raising crickets in my living room, well.... But here I am. Raising crickets. Or trying to. So far, no baby crickets. But the adults are not dying. They're chirping. They seem content. They stink, but they seem happy enough. I feed them bearded dragon pellets and chopped veggies. I wait for them to lay eggs.
I do not care for crickets. I don't mind their chirping. And I don't mind handling the little ones. There are a lot of escapees from Mambo's little cricket holding-pen that I find myself chasing down on a daily basis. But the big adults kind of creep me out. Their little legs are so.... grippy and ... crawly. I just don't care for them. But I'm raising them, so I can feed their children to my dragon. Sort of like Athens and Crete. Perhaps I should build Mambo a labyrinth and demand a regular tribute of 24 youths from my cricket subjects.
Except actually, I'm pretty much going to feed ALL the baby crickets to my dragon, so...
Maybe I should just drop the metaphor. It makes me feel kind of creepy.
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