Today was a breezy, but glorious day to work outside. After neglecting my slowly fading gardens for weeks now, we decided it was time to prepare them for winter.
This meant that the tomatoes needed to be pulled out. The tomatoes in the gardens by the house were not really producing anything over a cherry size anyway. So we went to work and in a little bit we had them cleared.
Another reason I wanted to pull these particular plants was that we needed to clean out the chicken coop. This is made much easier if some or all of the girls are outside. These chickens had never been loose before, but ran out rather quickly when the doors were thrown open. The kids went to work at the cleaning while we continued to work on the gardens. I didn't want the girls to get into the gardens while I had pesticide-laced tomatoes in them.
Once the house gardens were cleaned, we noticed these pesky buggers.
That leads me to the shop garden. Down there the plants were completely stripped clean of any and all leaves. I ran out of sevin dust (yes, I use it!) and the hornworms had their way with my tomatoes. They were actually eating my tomatoes at this point. I pulled off all the huge green tomatoes before we threw everything in the compost pile.
I couldn't believe how big some of them were. We will be having some fried green tomatoes in the days to come.
The only garden remaining is the vine garden and that is still growing and producing, yet. I left a bit of lettuce growing up in the house gardens to see if I can still get some yet this fall. I'm not optimistic, but maybe.
It feels good to have some of our fall chores done. I still have all my flower beds to do, but I choose to dwell on what I have done.
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