Holy Hornworms

I was doing my morning plant inspection in the garden when I noticed a vile looking green creature hanging from the bottom of a branch on one of our tomato plants.

Next to this thing was a leaf with all these gross looking brown egg-things on it - which might also be some sort of insect poo. Blech! I took off that leaf, smashed it into our fence and tossed it far away into the neighbor's yard (he has no plants and he's a single guy so I knew he wouldn't care). Then we looked at the vile green creature and tried to figure out if it was good or bad for the plants.

Farmer B decided it must be evil since the branch it was hanging from didn't have any leaves on it, so the green thing must have eaten them. We removed the branch from the plant and the boys spent a good bit of time oogling it.

Then came the whole "what do we do with this thing?" question. I didn't really want to step on it. The idea of its guts spewing out didn't appeal to me. So…we tossed it into the other neighbor's yard. This is a vacant house with no plants either. I realize we sound very un-neighborly, but our lots are about 2 acres and it just made us realize we need a plan for disposing of future garden beasties. Seriously what do you DO with a big green bug? Do gardeners really take the things to their front driveway and step on them? We will come up with a plan for future bug disposal because we realize that these creatures will probably just find a way back to our garden. We kept them very far away from a rear neighbor who actually has a vegetable garden, so we did try to do the right thing. Plus, stepping on it in front of the boys who were clearly amused by it seemed kind of wrong too.

Then I moseyed over to the pumpkin plant and found a small one of these disgusting things on a very-chewed up leaf. Now I wonder how many of these things are hidden in the garden?

So we came inside and whipped out our Organic Gardening book and flipped through disgusting page after disgusting page until we found it. It's a Tomato Hornworm. I suppose this is extremely common to anyone who's had a garden before, but as you know, this is uncharted territory for us. Apparently these things burrow into the soil, so I wonder how we got them with a new garden? Maybe one of the moths flew over to our garden at some point? To get rid of them you're supposed to hand-pick them off (yuck) or get wasps to come and eat them. It says ladybugs do a number on them too. I'll work on the wasp brigade soon.

Gah! What is this bug?

The boys and I were out in the garden this morning inspecting the plants and taking photos when Jace screamed and yelled "BUG!" He pointed to this little beastie crawling up the garden fence. Then we found two more of them. I thought it might be a cucumber beetle, but it doesn't look like the cucumber beetles in my Organic Gardening Book (see it listed off there to the right on my Amazon list). It can't be good to have these in the garden. It realize it looks huge in the photo, but it's about the length of a fingernail.

So I'm stumped. I admit to being a bit girly when it comes to bugs. Just looking through the pages of creepy-crawlies in the book makes me itch and jump everytime a loose hair touches my arm. I do get quite squirmy around bugs, but I'm trying to be a Gardening Queen and suck it up and identify this bug.

Anyone know what it is?

And what I do about it?

Ladybug Ladybug Fly Away Home

After a stint of extreme hoeing yesterday I heard the boys squealing with excitement about something by some trees. I dashed over there to find them pointing at a little red ladybug with no black spots. It sounds like I'm having a mushy mom moment, but one of the great things about kids is the joy they can find in something that adults consider mundane.

We watched the little ladybug crawling on some weeds.

We watched him very closely.

And then managed to convince him to crawl on Aidan's arm and then watched him fly away.

Of course, having a ladybug fly away led me to the nursery rhyme about ladybugs, which you should know are called ladybirds in England (and lady beetles elsewhere).

Ladybug ladybug fly away home,
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.

Then it led to the fun questions of why is their house on fire, where did their children go, what does their house look like? So I looked into it and found out that back in the "olden days" farmers knew of the ladybug's value in reducing the level of pests in their crops and it was traditional for them to cry out the rhyme before they burnt their fields following harvests (this reduced the level of insects and pests) in deference to the helpful ladybug.

There are also some stories about it being related to Catholic priests being burned at the stake for not swinging the way of the Protestants. That was a bit much, so we left it with the farmers burning crops version. We'll leave burning at the stake for another time.

They say the name ladybug came during the Middle Ages when swarms of pests were destroying crops, so farmers prayed to the Virgin Mary for help.  Soon after, ladybugs came and ate the bad pests and saved the crops.  The farmers called these bugs, "Beetles of Our Lady" and they eventually became known as "ladybugs, ladybeetles or ladybirds," depending on where you live. I'm always amused by these stories and wonder how true they are.

On to some quick ladybug education for the kids. Since they're into it, I thought we'd run with it and slip in some learning while they weren't looking:

Enchaned Learning's Ladybug Page - This site has a ton of ladybug crafts and learning sheets. You have to subscribe for some of them and others are free. It's worth having a dig around if you're doing any ladybug learning.

Ladybug Lore - That makes me giggle. I love the smell of lore in the morning. Great site though including how to say Ladybug in a lot of other languages.

DLTK's ladybug crafts - Tons of free ladybug kid crafts from one of my favorite kid-crafting sites.

Let's talk about my nuts

I've been very protective of my little peanut plants since they are the only plants in the garden that have not died or teetered on the edge of death. They seem quite hardy and determined to grow. I was just reading up on how to take care of my peanut plants when I realized that - yet again - I have missed the mark.

Turns out when plants were a few inches tall I should have thinned them to 8 to 12 inches apart. Um, we did not do that. I guess I got so excited that something was growing that the idea of early thinning did not appeal to me. I thought I was pretty close to the distance they should be, but I was wrong. I now have to hope they can survive in close proximity.

Then I read that "When plants are 8 to 12 inches tall, form a hill over them (as you do with potatoes) with about 6 inches of grass, straw, or loose soil to encourage pegging."

Uh, what? I have to form a hill over them as I do with potatoes? Huh. I have no idea what that means, so I went to YouTube and found a video showing a "real" garden guy hilling potatoes. Apparently you just put some dirt around the bottom of the plant. He didn't put a lot of dirt around the bottom of the plant, so it's not as hilly as it sounds. He said the key is to using a hoe and since we're extreme hoers, we're good to go.

Here are my newly-hilled peanuts.
Then it says "Peanuts begin flowering about a month or so after planting. The self-fertile flowers open in the morning, wither by evening, and then send their fruiting pegs into the soil a few days later. Avoid disturbing the soil where the nuts are forming."

Well we have had flowers, but no pegs off the flowers. In fact other than the occasional flower, the plants haven't changed much in weeks. Hmm..

Born Free

Most of our little tadpoles have grown up and turned into frogs… or become frog bait themselves. When we see four legs and no tail, we've been releasing the froglets into the back yard to live our their little froggy lives. They appear to be tiny tree frogs to me, but it's a bit hard to tell since they are so small.

It seems like ages ago that Tropical Storm Fay came through and flooded our yard, giving the boys the grand idea to hunt for tadpoles. It's been a great evolutionary lesson for the boys and sadly there are only one or two late bloomers left in our tadpole habitat, so I'd call our tadpole adventures about over. I'd recommend this to anyone with little kids because mine have learned so much from the whole experience.

Born free…as free as the tadpoles
As free as the frog grows
Free to follow your heart

Is it wrong that I kind of miss the little guys swimming around in that box on the patio? Besides, I now have a freezer full of frozen bloodworms and no one to eat them.

The Great Garden Experiment

This gardening blog has been less gardening and more rambling lately because of my terrible health affliction - my severe case of black thumb. It's quite obvious to anyone who's ever glanced at this blog that I have a bad case of black thumb and I really do not have any real skills when it comes to gardening. But we keep moving forward and I decided it was time to get to the bottom of the actual cause of the dying plants. So we set up an experiment this past weekend to see if we could come up with a cause for all of the death.

I purchased two tomato plants, two bell pepper plants, two pots, a large bag of Miracle Gro potting soil and a container of Miracle Gro liquid plant food. The idea was to plant one tomato plant and one pepper plant in our garden directly in the soil and another tomato plant and pepper plant in Miracle Gro potting soil in pots that are placed in our garden. They'll all have the same lighting and watering conditions since they're only a few feet away from each other. The only difference is the soil.

Aidan helped me plant the tomato and pepper in the pots.
And then we put the other two in the ground.

And per my Gardening Mr. Myagi's instructions, everything in the garden gets the weekly once-over with Liquid Miracle Gro.

It is important to note that I do have some existing tomato plants that are alive, but all my bell pepper plants died a very horrific death only a couple of weeks after being planted. If the potted plants live and the garden plants die, then we have soil issues. If they all die, I should probably give this gardening thing up. If they all live, I will be happy, but very confused.

Gardening Karma

I don't know who to thank for our recent stint of good luck in the garden. Should I stop by my Gardening Mr. Myagi's house and thank him for his advice? Should I thank my friend Dianne for sending us Basil Boddywicket, the gnome? Is it the fact that we no longer have the hot summer sun and torrential rains? Or is it just plain ole gardening karma that has come back around and blessed us with some life for a change? I don't know and frankly I don't care. All I know is that we have things growing in the garden and it's not just grass and weeds for once.

Aidan and I were in the garden weeding today and Aidan screamed 'MOMMY! LOOK! LOOK! A FLOWER!" and then commenced jumping up and down pointing at the pumpkin plant. He is famous for pointing out tiny flowers on weeds so I didn't think much of it until I turned around and saw it.

Do you see that? That's a big, beautiful yellow FLOWER on our pumpkin plant!

And do you see what's next to it? There are about 3 other buds of about-to-bloom flowers. Holy crap - maybe I won't have to buy a throw-down pumpkin to toss in the garden to impress the boys after all.

Thanks to Mr. Myagi's advice, I bought some Miracle Gro liquid and mixed it up into a watering can and sprinkled it over the entire garden this weekend. And here we are on Thursday with a pumpkin flower. Maybe it was the Miracle Gro? The back of the bottle said to use weekly for "spectacular" results. One flower is spectacular in my books!

And oddly enough, the carrots are growing too. The carrots that we accidentally planted about 3 months ahead of schedule that were supposed to die - those carrots. I think you're supposed to thin them, but I'm not sure how or when. Regardless we have carrots actually growing. They look so much like carrots that my mom (who was up visiting for the past 2 days) walked past the garden and said "Oh look! You have carrots growing!" (yes, it was said in utter disbelief).

Aidan is so excited by all this that he's very into weeding around the healthy plants in the hopes of keeping them alive. There's not much better than seeing your child weeding happily. And check out the tomato plants around him in this picture. Yup - they perked up recently too!

I'm as happy as a lipstick-wearing pig in slop right now.