Monday, August 22, 2011

Harvest Monday - August 22nd

Well, you win some, you loose some.  This past week was an interesting one.  On Tuesday I spent the day fighting off the Army Worms.  I thought at first they were tomato fruit worms and a neighbor called them cutworms.  Apparently they are all related. But I sent an email to the USU extension services with my bowl full of those nasty things (see below) and Taun said that they came from the alfalfa field and I was lucky that the ground was not moving.  Uhm, seriously?  If I had that many I don't think I'd ever garden again. I have faith things will be better - see, I'm starting more lettuce.

 I did have a crazy run in with the tomato hornworm.  I found a one inch tiny one first - not bad.  Then as I was shaking the only roma tomato in a cage this big fat hornworm flopped on the ground. It was at least 3/4 inch wide and 5 inches long.  Gag!  I screamed and then jumped back a few feet.  I lost half my roma tomatoes which is sad because I really wanted to try making my own tomato sauce because I purchased one of these this year.  I don't know if the plants will recover enough to give me some more.  I ripped off all the larger roma tomatoes - green or otherwise and checked for holes and if they were good, they got washed in soapy water and placed in the window as you can see here.  I have 8 roma plants and I don't think I'm going to get much after all.  


See - as my friend Keiko said, "I think I just threw up in my mouth." No, I did not touch the hornworm - I scooped it into the bowl with the lid.  Yes, I did pick off all those army worms by hand.  Thank you Atlas garden gloves. And having said that, I will never buy leather gardening gloves again.  The nitrile touch garden gloves have spoiled me.  They wash well and wick the moisture away.  I LOVE them.  They fit well.  And I don't get dirt down into the tips of the glove fingers like I did with the leather gloves. I blame the seams for that.  Atlas nitrile touch garden gloves rock!

I did have some luck on Thursday and harvested this nice bunch of tomatoes, 1 more squash, and 4 lemon cucumbers. Loving the lemon cucs.  

And go check out Daphne's Dandelions to see fun a beautiful harvests from all over the world. It's also interesting to see how far behind I am living here in the tops of the mountains.  And I have to share this photo again.  Can you blame me?



3 comments:

Rhonda Gales said...

I checked out the sauce maker. Goes to the top of my Christmas list this year. I only put in 1 Roma plant and boy am I sorry. Utah stole my heart years ago. I absolutely love the beautiful mountains, and the people are great too. I've spent alot of time in Ogden.

Ben Czajkowski said...

I'm sorry about the hornworm. I ran into one last year, on my sunkist tomatoes. Freaked me out because I had never seen one before. What was weird to me was that it was covered in white sacs.

Come to find that the white sacs meant that a parasitic wasp had gotten to the hornworm, which is a good thing.

Death to those little buggers!

Thomas said...

WOW....that's a lot of tomato worms. Hopefully you have some chickens to give them to.