The day I prayed would never come, finally did. Today we found a tomato horn worm in the garden. I am revolted beyond belief. How these things just magically appear one day and yet are the size of your thumb, I simply cannot understand. Yuck.
Allegedly, a horn worm can devour the leaves of an entire tomato plant in one day. The accepted way to eliminate them is to pick each worm off the tomato stem and feed them to chickens. Luckily, we have lots of chickens. Unluckily, our chickens are divas. They took one look at the worm we tossed in their run, gave it one halfhearted test peck, and promptly echoed my sentiment of "yuck, yuckitty, yuck, yuck" and refused to go near it again. So much for feathered pest control.
We resorted to a pot of soapy water which worked perfectly until Liam stepped it in by accident and had a meltdown screeching that the worm "horned" him while doing a panicky one footed hop around the yard. Once he mellowed out, we calmly read up on horn worms and how they cannot actually sting anyone. Even so, the boys are now much more wary of harvesting tomatoes for me. I cannot say that I blame them. Those little camouflaged beasts are the most disgusting surprise ever. If I never seen another one again, it will be too soon.
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