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Thursday, August 01, 2013

EEK a Snake



Badger, badger, badger..... mushroom......

Oh, sorry, not that kind of snake.

I was venting considerable ire on some weeds next to the kitchen walkway yesterday. Dirt and greenery were flying before my shovel like a tsunami of ticked off.

I bent to pull some ground cherries that were choking out the Stella D'oro lilies and came away with this thing dangling right from my hand.

A measure of just how irritable I was....I just thought, "Hmmm, a tomato hornworm, I'll go get the camera..."

....rather than shrieking like a girl and flinging it forty feet. I mean, it was RIGHT THERE IN MY HAND! 



When we were kids I remember finding one in the tomatoes in the first garden I ever experienced when we lived on an old farm just down the road from here. Mom was so horrified she had somebody...I don't remember who...soak it in some flammable substance and torch it in the driveway. These days I am not quite as impressed.

Since we have no tomatoes this summer, I chucked it back into the ground cherry patch that passes for a flower bed by the back door. Let it munch to its heart's content...all the fewer weeds for me to pull.

8 comments:

Moms Musings said...

I saw one of those bugs on a tomato plant in my mother's garden. They're ugly and the reason why I never tried to grow tomatoes, if I ever saw one, I'd never eat any of the tomatoes I grew.

Anonymous said...

Tomatoes are our only ag crop. This is our arch enemy. We scout for them daily hoping to find it while it's still a tiny worm.

ellie k said...

When I was young we used to take them from the plants and throw them into the chicken coop and watch the chicken grab them and then chase each other trying to take it away, finally the worm was just bits and pieces or gone.

Ed said...

Very cool, I heard the horns can sting you..:-)

Cathy said...

Perhaps you are a co-sufferer . . . of the mid-life-on-up condition . . . . .wherein we start more and more to empathize with all creatures, ugly or otherwise.

I astonish myself with the efforts I'll go to - to get a spider off the kitchen counter and into the wilds of the backyard.

Now. As for saving the tomatoes: 40 years-ago my neighbor dispatched them by increasing their momentum before they encountered the stockade fence that separated our yards. Thunk. Thunk.

But wait! I'm not done! This will alter your universe regarding hornworms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zrKelsKKqg

CDH said...

ewwwwwww! I would have screamed, and hucked that nasty thing as far as I could. I am a BIG sissy when it comes to creepy crawly things. lol!

Cathy said...

P.S. Ahahahahaa!! When I wrote "dispatched them " I surely meant the worms . . not the tomatoes :)

threecollie said...

Cathy, I was appalled by them as a kid. now I know they grow into a pretty cool moth, and I don't find them so worrisome. Sure are ugly though

Jan, too bad you don't still have that guinea hen. She would make short work of them!

Ellie, cool, if gory. I once saw the hens get a mouse and I was stunned by the speed with which they dispatched it. Violent critters under those fluffy feathers

Ed, hmmm, I don't know, have to look it up. A lot of caterpillars do sting, some of them pretty badly.

Cathy, that was a genuinely creepy little poem...

CDH, normally I would probably have done the same but I was in a pretty dark and angry mood, fearing neither man nor beast. lol