Disclaimer - I don't really garden for food. Not like some other people I know. I garden for garnish. I have basil, onions, sage, thyme, oregano. Oh, and my experimental blue potatoes and one spaghetti squash plant. The beets never took off this year. But then there are the TOMATOES. Eight tomato plants live in a row in my back yard along the only sunny strip of dirt.
Our yard is shady and I'm gone much of the summer or I would have a garden. I think it is important to grow food and it is satisfying to work in a garden. I belong to a CSA so I get fresh produce every week I'm here, but one day I'll have a place and the opportunity to grow a vegetable garden again. Just not zucchini.
Last year the tomatoes met an untimely end due to a errant weed-wacker with an operator stoned out on cold meds. This year I planted them and put up a brick divider to clearly indicate these are plants I'd like to keep, not weeds. So far, it seems to be working.
But nature has her own assassins.
Behold the tomato horn worm. These babies can strip a tomato of its leaves before you can turn around twice and say "what"?
I've been picking them off since I got back and I've probably pulled off a dozen over the week I've been home. The last few days have been horn-worm-free although I'm still on guard.
I'm normally the kind of person who will catch a moth and let it go, trap a spider and throw it outside, swerve to avoid a rabbit on the road.
But with these worms I've become ruthless.
I tear off the leaves they are on and then I place the whole, succulent bit in the front yard for the robins.
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