RAIN RAIN RAIN - July 21, 2023

Good grief, it is raining hard!  Wind is roaring, thunder is booming.  My phone is screaming, "A severe thunderstorm has been detected in your area."  As if I didn't know.  

This is the second round of storms within 24 hours.  Last night about 9 o'clock, a big thunderclap out of nowhere, followed by the longest continuous rumble I've ever heard, ran me off the porch and into the house, where it wasn't so noisy. During the night, every time I woke up it was raining.  The sun came out for a little while this morning, but it didn't last long.  I've had to turn on the back porch light to see what I'm doing.

The ditch out by the road is full and spilling into the yard.  There are limbs in the road - not huge ones, but ones you'd want to drive around rather than over.  I should go out and drag them out of the road, but not in this storm.

If it keeps this up, our vegetable garden may be a goner.  :(  Many of the tomatoes are just brownish-green bags of water.  I've thrown away four times what I've harvested.  

All that work . . . 

Well, it kept me off the streets, at least. 

Speaking of tomatoes, so far this year we have had fewer tomato hornworms than ever.  (I hope I didn't just jynx us.)  We've found maybe 5 small ones all season.  I picked them off and smushed them and have not had to use any pesticides.

So what is different this year?  To what do we owe this luck?

It has been the rainiest gardening season I can remember.  Pop-up showers all over the place.

The farmer planted corn instead of soybeans.  

For a second year, we paved the middles with cardboard.

I put home-made compost around the tomato plants.  It is full of scratchy eggshells.

All I know about tomato hornworms is that they start (or end, depending on how you look at it) with a brown moth that can hover like a bee.  This moth lays eggs on the tomato plants, and out of those eggs hatch tiny green worms that start eating immediately.  I don't know what happens to the ones that grow into monstrous green worms and never get killed by anything.  I guess it goes somewhere and morphs into a moth.  There's some pupating in the cycle, somewhere.  And I think the worms go in and out of the dirt.  I do know that I used to find GOBS of those little green ones - brown ones, too - when I pulled up weeds late in the season.  They'd be all in the dirt, and I would smash them.  But I haven't pulled all that many weeds for the past couple of years (thanks to the cardboard carpeting and the rain), so I don't know what the below-ground population is like this year.  

Are they trapped under cardboard?

Are they getting injured by eggshells in the mulch?

Are they drowning?

Oh, I hope they are!  ;)