Garden pests....

Every year that we've lived in this WINDY city, we've had major struggles with our garden. This year was no exception. One year we had hoards of Grasshoppers, the next year it was squash bugs, then shield bugs, they suck all the moisture out of your plants so they just wither up and die before you even know whats going on. And of course, the wind. There is always the wind. Curse the wind.

As we all know, Max is garden obsessed. For reals. He doesn't like ANY help in the garden (unless it's pulling weeds). You could go as far to say he's downright anal about his garden. He babies the garden like crazy. He checks on it before work and after work every day. If he comes home DURING work he'll check on it again. We should have stock in bamboo skewers and Velcro tape for the amount he uses to stake his vines so the wind doesn't devastate them. His anal-ness usually pays off. This year NOTHING grew well but his tomatos and onions. His tomatos and onions were beautiful.

Which brings me to this year's pests..... CHILDREN---boys to be exact. First we had one little boy pull ALL our onions out of the soil and leave them by the garden box. Max about cried. That same little boy picked a bunch of tomatos (before they were ripe) off the vine and chucked them all over our yard. He did this a few times before Max had a talk with his Mom. Needless to say, he's not allowed over here anymore. We though the destruction was over.......We were so WRONG.

Last weekend we get a knock on our back door. It was 2 boys, and their parents coming to apologize. It seems the boys were having some tomato fun and had pulled ALL of Max's biggest tomatos off the vine and destroyed them. These weren't your average tomatos, these suckers were the size of a mans hand. I'm serious, Max had measured. He was waiting for them to be ABSOLUTELY perfect before he picked them. He was too late. Now they're gone.

What's worse is the mom of one of the boys told me that Max needed to "suck it up" and asked if we were REALLY going to eat all those tomatos (does it matter, and YES). She doesn't like tomatos and I think she thinks all tomatos are the same. She's wrong. Garden tomatos are HEAVEN. I tried to explain to her how he had been taking such careful good care of these particular tomatos and how he was so excited every day he checked on them, that none of them had cracked and how important they had been to his garden happiness etc etc. She didn't get it. Tomatos aren't her thing.

That night Maddy said "can we get an electric fence?" She's funny, and may be on to something.