In my pre-waterside life, I would typically use the term parasite to describe a hanger-oner ex-boyfriend or the really annoying person at work who stops by all the time to chat for no general purpose. However, now that I’m “with garden”, I have to watch over my babies to make sure they are germ free. It’s not like real kids, who you let put all kinds of stuff from the airplane floor in their mouths so that “they build up immunities.” These are plant children who I have nurtured since they were seeds (truthfully, all the seed ones died, but I did nurture these since they were adopted from the nursery) and are now being eaten alive!
I harvested (again) today, picking another million or so cucumbers. I don’t have any more room in the pantry for pickles (2 dozen quart jars and 1 dozen pint jars – for the little pickles) and I don’t have any more time. Once I ran out of the easy to use pickle mix in a bag, it became a lot more work to actually have to assemble and measure all the ingredients and then convert my cucumbers into pickles. So, I rinsed the green appendages and will figure out how to sneak them over to my neighbor’s porches when I’m wearing my camouflage gear.
While watering the abundant garden, I noticed some white things on the tomato plants. Coming back to the house to refer to my garden oracle, Google, I discovered that I have Tomato Hornworms! They are nasty looking green caterpillars with a mouthful of teeth – looking like little mini green prehistoric brontosaurus dinosaurs (I know it’s a stretch). Lucky for me, Google also told me how to banish such pestilence from my garden – simply drop the leaf eaters into soapy water. Not that my garden is organic or anything; I just don’t have appropriate pesticides handy to spray the entire damn yard with.
That seems fairly easy, so now I’m off to the garden with my dove bar and water.
Fast Forward 15 minutes… now that I’ve washed my hands with Purell for 5 minutes
ICK! I was totally ok with the soapy water thing. Until I realized that I would have to pull HARD on these things to get them to let go of the tomato plant! They could have just said that the best way to remove the hornworms is to squeeze the bejesus out of them while you are pulling them off the leaf. I don’t think they survived long enough to care about a soapy drowning. And now I have a new “icky bug dance” that I’m sure my neighbors will be posting on You Tube any minute now.
I am starting to believe that my sweetie was right – it’s much easier to buy the vegetables I want from the farmer’s market.
My suggestion would be to display the remains of all the drowned horn worms as a warning to those who invade your garden — get medieval on those miscreants…
Ah yes. The dreaded Hornworm……….Maybe you could train them to eat cucumbers……