Gardening Misfortunes

After a recent summer vacation, I returned home to find my incredibly lovely tomato plants stripped of their life- more than half of the leaves gone, and in their place, horrible, disgusting, nightmare-invoking horn worms.

-Ok- a bit of a lie - my tomatoes were never all that lovely. In fact, after preparing the soil, planting more than 7 specimens (and killing half of them…I should have been a bit more skeptical of the name “Mr. Stripey”), daily watering, fertilizing, weeding, and shading as needed, the plants never emerged from the “give ‘em some time and they’ll look nice, I promise” stage. I would venture to say that my entire harvest amounted to a large handful at best.

And as for my selection of peppers (red, purple, green, orange- you name it, I bought it)…every single edible piece promptly rotted on the stem. In a moment of gardening fury, I tore those plants out of the ground and let the earth return to its natural state: weeds, glorious weeds! At least my garden patches are now in harmony with the rest of the yard.

Notes for next years’ endeavors:

Tomatoes: no
Peppers: no
Horn Worms: no
Produce grown by someone else at reasonable prices: oh yes

-Natalie