war in the veggie garden

I’ve been remiss in posting on my blog, so when I overslept this morning, missing my morning trip to the gym, I thought I would take the opportunity to share with you why by taking some photos.  I’ve been waging war in the vegetable garden.  Last week, I found my first two tomato fruitworms burrowing into my beautiful ‘Juliet’ Roma-grape tomatoes.  So I ‘took care of them’ and applied BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) on the eggs of the young; I’m growing everything organically.  Ok, I lost a few to a common pest and helped mother nature take care of controlling the remaining pest population.

Then I came home to a ruin of tasty slicing tomatoes still dangling from the vine.  Something was taking various sized chunks out of them.  I had installed a deer fence around the garden  in the spring, so I knew some smaller critter was enjoying my growing harvest.  Initially, I thought it might be squirrels or chipmunks since the neighbors had problems with squirrels last year, devastating their entire harvest in one weekend; I’m growing indeterminate heirlooms (Giant Belgium Pink and  Costoluto Fiorentino) so I will have a continual crop all summer and hopefully avoid a complete loss.  Last weekend I spent an entire afternoon constructing a netted cover for the garden.  But I missed one small corner since I had just barely enough netting to finish the job… and that’s why I found out who the thief was, a bird.  He found the small hole and took one last bite before I secured that hole with additional netting and some zip-ties.

So far so good for this week.  I’ve been able to harvest the home grown tomatoes and make some delicious tomato sauce or ‘gravy’ as commonly called here.  I’ve never tasted such sweet sauce from home grown tomatoes.  Definitely worth waging war in the veggie garden.