So I was sitting at my parents’ table after a recent camping trip and noticed the Sacramento Bee’s Carlos Acala was having a poetry contest about gardening and asking for submissions. Winners would be published July 18th. Of course he would expect the usual complaints about moles and slugs, and a few fruit stealing incidents in literary form. I had a vision though. I wanted something different. I wanted to be the Upton Sinclair of horticulture. I wanted to be the “Silkwood” of the gardening industry. I wanted to rock their world.
Devoted gardeners everywhere will instantly recognize this avaricious visitor. The Horn worm, or tomato worm, is much despised in the agricultural world. He is famed for eating through your tomato leaves at the rate of a whole plant in a single night. Certainly there could be absolutely no reasonable value in letting him stick around. Except for this:
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=toNUsuYAZiw]
Have you ever seen one of these? This is the Hummingbird, Hawk, or Sphinx Moth. They come to your flowers to take nectar and their heavy bodies move as if they were flying underwater. I first saw one when I was camping on the Russian River. It was twilight, and the strange evening hummingbird appeared to visit the flowers but didn’t fly away when we went to investigate. I couldn’t imagine what it could be and called the park ranger in the morning. He hadn’t seen one either, and had to call three friends, but we eventually solved the mystery. They are nearly as big as your fist, and there are many variations in coloring. I have only seen three in my lifetime, but I remember each precious glimpse.
It is stunning to me that considering all the gruesome detail with which we are warned against tomato worms, we aren’t at least given a mention of what they grow up to be. It’s almost an illicit secret, suppressed by the Ortho lobby or the Tomato Growers Association of America or something. With the weighty moral compass of a woman who had helped save beavers, I figured that my entry to the garden verse contest would have to address this prejudicial silence. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.
Make friends with the Pest and Potato
Cultivate Peace: Garden NATO
No moth, me thinks
can rival the sphinx
She just needs a little Tomato!
I was proud of myself. A limerick, more accessible than the lofty sonnet, and how many women can rhyme sphinx? Garden descriminations being what they are, I, sadly, didn’t win, although I was contacted by the columnist running the contest who cleverly remarked that he would garden NATO but he didn’t know “where to get the seeds”. Aha! Suppressed by a Burpee and an Ortho lobby! It’s a green consipiracy.
Here is the fully-expected tomato poem that contained adequate prejudice to win.
The Tomato Worm
If I had to pick my garden’s number one pest I think that the Tomato Worm stands above the rest It can devour a tomato plan almost overnight To see the devastation is quite a fright It’s voracious appetite one must stop Left uncontrolled and you’ll have no crop In addition to all this, it’s such an ugly worm Just the sight of them always makes me squirm
— Craig Wahl, Sacramento
Ahh Craig, you’re sooo establishment. You can read the other stepford-gardener-entries here. They’re a lot of fun, and the Bee’s garden section is one of the best around. But its missing a poem about sphinx moths. The gaping hole is obvious. Sigh.
I’m just curious. What if they grew up to be puppies? or unicorns? would gardeners still routinely kill them?
