A New Place, a New Garden, a Hungry Caterpillar

This year, the Beez are living in a new home. Blessed with more space, a flat yard, a cul-de-sac, we bid farewell to our first home as a married couple, and moved into our life house, the one where we see ourselves raising our family and hosting friends, movies in the basement and splashing in the backyard.

With our new home has come an adjustment year for gardening. Rather than dive right in, we've got a lovely container setup this year. I'm not absolutely in love with it, but it's given us time to get to know our yard and scale back our production a little as we settle in here.

Cute, right? I do love this vertical planter, and the rabbits cannot get to it! 

This week, our little garden received a "special" visitor. Meet the Hungry Caterpillar.

More specifically, this is a Tomato Hornworm, and the little jerkwad eats - you guessed it - tomato plants. At first, I was just in awe of this little critter. I mean, he's SO large, SO fat, SO HUNGRY.

So, night #1, we marveled at him, and let him be. Ooops!

"What's that?" you ask, Well, that would be caterpillar poop. Poop that resulted from the jerkwad nibbling on not 1, but 4 tomato plants in just one night. 

See these bite marks? I've seen this type of damage before and blamed groundhogs due to the size of the bites. 

Obviously, all of this damage called for action. The next morning, a caterpillar flinging expedition was organized. 

B bravely plucked Jackwad from the plant.

And flung it into the woods. 

So long Hungry Caterpillar!! Please don't come back!



Addendum: The very next morning the caterpillar was back. So Bean and I went to greater lengths and threw it in a storm drain across the street....wouldn't you know as I was driving away to work, I saw a bright green blob climbing out of the drain. We haven't seen one in our yard again though! Fingers crossed!