Summer Carnage

Visited a friend today to see what’s new on her farm and was led down memory lane. We were in the vegetable garden admiring her various heritage tomato plants when I saw the BIGGEST tomato horn-worm I’ve ever seen. Fatter than my middle finger he was; his fat, juicy, green and white and black-striped body with its tell-tale black horn jutting from his head; or is it his tail, brought me right back to my own tomato patches of the past. I instinctively grasped the horn, mindless of my friend’s horror and pulled him away from the leafless stem one suction-cup leg at a time, until he hung from my thumb and index finger squirming and spitting, and the battle was on. We found five-inch-long ones and one-inch longs and all sizes in between. We marveled at their initial invisibility until I recalled the poop is one easy way to find these destructive, hungry monsters. They eat and eat and eat, then litter the leaves and soil beneath themselves with substantial black poops. My inner murderer, which you will recognize from having read MasterGardener – the novel, becomes highly active in garden scenarios. A contest ensued as to who could squirt their horn-worm's innards the furthest underfoot. The garden was left littered with flattened striped bodies, juices glistening against the dry earth, returning their stolen spoils back from whence they began. Rejuvenated and refreshed, my fingers green with horn-worm spit, I declared myself the winner, having rid the tomato patch of fifty-six assorted–sized horn-worms, and saved, I do not know how many, ripening tomatoes from death. I haven’t felt so good since the last infestation. Perhaps it’s time I got back to planting tomatoes. Perhaps I could hire myself out as a horn-worm picker. Perhaps I should just get back to writing.

 Below see the squirming head on a bared stem. Yuck!

 A good-sized fellow wouldn't you say?

 Note the ball of poop on the leaf below ... arg ... and the ground trail.

Any offers?

For more on the subject see:             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_hornworm

MasterGardener - The Novel - a summer read

Time in the garden is time to think. While the hostas thrust firm green stems through damp cool ground in the spring to reach for the sun’s warming rays, there is a sense of the universe and nature being at one. It’s a busy time of survival and renewal with nest building, verdant growth, leaves pushing out from cold winter’s grasp. Energy abounds in this spring work; we’re aware that summer’s lazy heat will soon sap our strength, leaving us soft  like melted  butter, our skin crisping, shielding ourselves under trees and  gazebos and umbrellas, gazing in awe at roofers and farmers and marathon bikers.  Autumn’s voluptuous bounty is but a short reprieve teasing us back outside into the fresh scents (sometimes mouldy too) of falling leaves and magical shaggy mane mushrooms until alas, winter winds blow us indoors once again to gaze mournfully through frosted panes at our shivering mounds of shrubs and potted plants. We’re thankful when the poor dears are able to draw snow blankets around their branchy shoulders and huddle, covered, in wishful dreams of spring.

It is these seasonal characteristics that motivated me to write MasterGardener. Years of observing the effect of nature on gardeners, wildlife and children led me to wonder how it was in the earlier days before air conditioning and other technological advances. I began to read everything I could about gardening from Pliny to Rudyard Kipling, from seed catalogues to fiction, becoming increasingly interested in the webs of similarities of plant behaviours and human behaviours. For instance, there are plants that reproduce by flinging their seeds away from the parent plant onto the wind as a dandelion does; there are the hidden propagators who send out runners, underground, to sprout unseen as does the lily of the valley; the asparagus plant invites grackles and other birds to taste its glowing red berries in the fall when the birds, are on the move. Those seeds fall in their own casing of bird-provided manure to grow along fence rows.

For every plant characteristic there is a personality trait in humans and this has been mentioned in writings since early times, by the serious and not so serious observers of our world as can be noted in this excerpt from the novel MasterGardener:

I once loved brown-eyed Susan

but my love for her is dead,

for I found a bachelor’s button,

in brown-eyed Susan’s bed.

Rudbekia hirta (Latin for black-eyed Susan) is touted as one of the most loved wildflowers, with its golden-orange daisies and brown centres. The plant and root have both been used by North American tribes to treat a wide range of ailments from worms in children to snakebites and earaches.

Bachelor’s button was known to women healers as a clarifying flower, an aid to finding things previously hidden.

This garden lore tickles my fancy, sends my imagination soaring into the kitchens and bedrooms and workplaces of the world to discover stories to be told. Come, travel with me as I share some imaginings in this blog and please tell me your interesting, related discoveries from the garden and the world.