Gardening

I am very upset about my veggie garden this fall. I noticed yesterday morning that Horn worms, also known as cabbage/tomato worms have been eating my veggie leaves!!!! They are everywhere!!!!! The only veggies that were not damaged by these worms were my spinach & turnip greens. I wonder why..... worms and other bugs don't like spinach & turnip greens? I am not complaining, but it is so weired.

I can't believe that horn worms are back again. They totally destroyed my tomato plant this past summer also. I want to get rid of them but I am totally against using chemicals so I started to read about it online. I found out that there is a natural way of getting rid of these ugly pests. It turns out that All purpose flour can be used against them. All I need to do is to put some flour in a paper bag, poke some holes at the bottom of a bag and sprinkle flour on top of my veggies. These worms supposedly will explode after eating some flour. I don't know if it true or not but I hope that this method will work for my garden. I can also cut some potatoes (yes potatoes) and barely them around my veggies for few weeks and pull them out. I guess that all kind of pests will attach themselves to the rotten potatoes and they will eat potatoes instead of my veggies. I just need to remember to dig out potatoes & attached pests out so that I can get rid of some of the pests that live underground. I learned all these tricks from HGTV online. They have some great videos on "Eco-Friendly Ways to Handle Common Gardening ChoresVideos". I watched their "Natural Pest Control". If you are into gardening, this is a must see video! Visit http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/pac_ctnt_988/text/0,,HGTV_22056_62186,00.html.

Anyways, look at the pictures below. Aren't they ugly? I really hate them!!!! Wish me luck that I can get rid them soon without using any chemicals!

I was pulling weeds from my veggie garden yesterday and noticed something was moving on my tomato plant. I took a close look and realized that a huge caterpillar was living on my tomato plant.

At first I thought oh, this is cool and I was showing it to my daughter and her friends. The kids really enjoyed observing this creature.

Anyway, I wanted to know more about this caterpillar, so I read about it online. It turns out that this particular caterpillar is a pest! It is called a hornworm and it doesn't even turn into a beautiful butterfly. Eventually, this hornworm turns into a huge ugly moth!!!! They usually attack tomato plants and some other plants. I do not want to use any pest control chemicals on my veggies, so I basically pulled this caterpillar out of my garden and put him down at near by park. My husband thought that I should kill him, but I just could not do it. I hope that he can survive out in the open field eating some weeds....lol

This hornworm turned out to be a pest, but at least my daughter, her friends and I leaned something new. It was a good educational session for all of us

http://bp1.blogger.com/_jYbJ6bbcWgE/Rq9KU9khPFI/AAAAAAAAAMk/n3vEwbQdPnI/....

My veggies are growing fast. Last months, I planted green beans, carrots, soy beans, onions, cucumbers, spinach, peas, tomatoes, water melon and okras. I cannot wait to eat them.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, one bad thing happened to one of my plants. One of my Labrador retrievers, a 2 year old lab, jumped over into my garden and stepped on my water melon plant and destroyed it. I was very upset, but what can I do right? After this incident, I learned my lesson not to leave him outside unattended. My 5 year old lab does not get into stuff, but this 2 year old lab still has some puppy energy in him. He loves trouble.

Well, look at some pictures of my veggie plants I took today. They are really growing strong. I wish I can share some of my veggies with my online friends when they are ready to be picked. I am not using any chemicals and they are all organic! Stay tuned for more pictures in the future!