Sonofabitch!! Why do so many of my posts start like this? Because every time I stamp out a pesticle problem in my garden, a new one crops up! (See what I did there? “Crops up” Ha ha ha)
It’s immensely frustrating spending so much of my garden time removing or killing pesticles. I want to nature bathe in the lush green leaves, plump vegetables, and colorific flowers of my garden. But noooooo, instead, I get to be the Orkin guy.
This week’s pesticle du jour are caterpillars.
I used to like caterpillars when I was a kid; cute and sometimes furry, with pretty colors and fun designs. Harmless and tickly crawling around on your hand. As an adult, I have grown an appreciation for some of the moths that they turn in to. But in the garden, these things are a menace.
This year I had my first exposure to Tomato Fucking Hornworms (finding a third one early last week). See my post Pesticles Part 3: Tomato Fucking Hornworms for great pics and creative namecalling for those shitbiscuits.
I’ve mostly posted about my veggie garden, but I love flowers, too. I’ve been growing my own petunias from seed for hanging baskets for a few years, although this year I traded those in for nasturtiums, with minimal success. Look for another future post about that.
Point is, out in front of my house I have loads of petalful beauty, and they seem to fare as well as my veggie garden. In other words: pesticles.
This year’s petunias exist in a giant barrel tub with some pansies, and they’ve been pretty spectacular:
Since I took the above pic in July, the black petunias have taken over the basket, especially after the yellow ones started dying off and I pulled them out without diagnosing or treating them, except for Neem oil.
So now at the end of summer, the beautiful black petunias are owning the barrel, all bushy and huge and beautiful. However, when I returned from an overnight trip recently, and got a good look at this front barrel when I pulled up the driveway, I discovered that all of a sudden, they look like shit!
A closer look at the blooms revealed:
Obviously something is eating my black beauties. And the purple ones, too. My first thought was Japanese Fucking Beetles – because they are black holes of garden doom – so I spent some time trying to find one still munching, and confirm my hypothesis.
None. No crunching beetles. A couple of the vines near the back had some aphid and spider mite activity, but nothing a little Neem won’t clear out, and definitely nothing that can tear through three inch diameter blossoms like this.
It took me quite a while, because the shitsquirts in question are well camoflauged.
Caterpillars. At least seven of them on the day I took these pics, and then I’ve found a few more since then. They blend right in with the branches, and so have been hiding in plain sight for days or weeks. I should have noticed the caterpillar shit sooner (it’s the little black spots all over the leaves), but the seed pods also release tiny black seeds onto the leaves sometimes, and at a glance, that’s what I thought I had been seeing.
Fucking gross. Caterpillar shit all over everything, and a long scavenger hunt to find the little camoflauged fucktrumpets. I don’t know what kind they are, and I don’t care. There were multiple sizes from less than an inch to about three inches long; and multiple colors from light yellow to dark green. No fancy designs or colors, though.
I hate using nasty pesticides in the garden if I can avoid it, so I went right to the obvious and immediate fix. I grabbed a stick and pulled off every one of the assbaskets I could find. I threw them far out onto the concrete driveway so that they will never be able to make the long trek back to the flower barrel, and so that the birds, sunshine, and extreme heat get to be the executioners instead of me.
I went back out the next day and pulled a few more. I haven’t seen a nest anywhere, but read that there is probably one in the trees, and that I could puncture and then scrape out the nest, too, to prevent more. Uggg. That’s the stuff of nightmares. I admit, I’m not actively looking for the nest.
The good news is that I seem to have gotten most or all of them, because since then, I’ve only found one more tiny caterpillar, and no more decimated flowers. Woohoo!!
Snails
I live in Colorado, on the Front Range near Denver. It’s DRY here. All year long. Growing up on the east coast of the U.S., we always thought Colorado = Snow. And since snow is made of water…but no. The snow and any other moisture is in the mountains, but most of the population centers are not, and that includes the Denver metro area. Rain here is rare and fast. Humidity sits around 10% most of the time.
The reason I mention this is that the last thing I expect to see in my dry-ass count-every-drip-and-minute-of-irrigation garden is SNAILS.
In moist humid parts of the country snails are pretty common. They were sliming all over the front windows of my sister’s home in Texas when I visited a few weeks ago, and all over the sidewalks of our resort in Newport Beach, CA when we visited a few years ago. But here in Mordor Denver, I have never seen one in the wild.
Until this week.
I’ve been trying to solve the mystery of my dying pole beans for a while, you can read more about that in my post The Potatoes are Dead, Long Live the Beans! . However, I’ve been unable to accurately diagnose and treat the problem, probably because there’s more than one problem. There’s been the Japanese Fucking Beetles, the slugs that ate the first sprouts and have been hanging around the soil under the mature beans, cucumber beetles, nutritional issues, and more recently, some small flying things that I can never actually see because they buzz off whenever I approach.
But when investigating one of the tell tale dark spots on a bean leaf I found these:
Goddamsonofafuckingbitch!!! Seriously, is there any ass-sneezing fucktarding pesticle I haven’t had this year? No wait, don’t answer that, you know it will be predictive.
I didn’t even bother to look up what to do. I’m tired and grossed out, and the season’s almost over anyway. Instead, I plucked off the leaves that had these doucheweasels, and threw it over the fence. [For the record, “over the fence” is either the green space next to a four-lane major thoroughfare in front of a pond, or the green space right next to a sidewalk adjacent to a main neighborhood street. I am NOT tossing them into someone else’s yard, in case you were wondering.] I know, I did the same with the hornworms, so am I really solving the problem? No, prolly not, but they won’t be back in MY garden this year, and I don’t want to kill them. Caterpillars are jelly-filled and gooey, I’m not going to squash or poison them and then have to scrape up their slimey remains. Barf! And you know what kind of sound a snail will make if you squash them; my tummy is turning and my face grimacing at just the thought. Plus, they’re gooey inside, too, so it’s like crunchy caterpillars. Ewwww!! At least my “over the fence” method gives them a fighting chance at survival, and I’ll be able to keep down my breakfast AND sleep tonight.
So there you have it, another problem solved! (It’s okay if you’re laughing because that was a ridiculous statement, but we tell ourselves what we need to hear to get by, and I’m laughing, too. More of a sardonic or sarcastic laugh, but still.)
But WAIT! There’s MORE!
I’ve been excitedly waiting for my autumn Deep Purple carrots to sprout, since I planted them the first week in August. They should definitely have come up by now, and have an inch or two of new growth. Noticing that the little carrot square is still nearly empty, I decided to deepen my investigation.
Upon closer inspection, I can see what is happening here, and why I do not have carrots growing. The little sprouts have no leaves. Gee, I wonder who did that? I don’t see the tell-tale slime trails of slugs, my first best guess. Is it the grasshoppers? Some other critter I don’t know about yet?
Just then, my husband came out to cut some chives and rosemary, the residents of the squares next to the carrots. I cut away a large swath of the chives, and whaddaya know, look at the douchecanoe I found hiding:
Unbelievable. This thing is gi-fucking-gantic. Seriously, it’s huge. And of course it’s huge. It’s been dining on chives and baby carrots to its’ heart’s content, hiding away in the dark spots during the day while avoiding my semi-heartless investigations.
This cockbucket is so big that there was only one person to call for help: my 8 year old resident entomologist. She was happy to step into the role of malacologist (a person who studies slugs and snails) for this emergency.
With her trusty protective gloves, my little Mighty Mouse came to save the day:
The Pottymouth Gardener 