My garden is a teensy bit overgrown. I just don't have the gumption to garden when it's 90 degrees before 8 a.m. and our days have been a whirlwind of camps and swimming and trips to the beach and to visit dear friends and baby showers and bowling and skee ball and trips to the aquarium and theater and library and the making of zucchini bread and repeated showings of Eclipse and suddenly I'm staring down more peppers than I thought a plant could produce and I still don't know how to can them. I've found a website that advises storing things in vinegar for well-intentioned but ultimately half-assed gardeners such as moi. So much to do. Each day rushes into the next before.

Anyway, I didn't want to get into that so much as I wanted to note that my garden is not unlike a tropical jungle swimming with giant plants and requiring one to don hip waders and mosquito netting to repair the plants that keep being knocked to the ground during storms. During one such tentative outing, I was wrestling with one my tomato plants (and for the amount of space they take up, these dang Brandywine tomatoes better be beyond compare for flavor) and trying to get it to agree to not lay on the ground where it will rot, I cam across my old nemesis. I have a lot of nemeses in the garden world, it would seem. Just when one has been duly subdued, another rises to challenge my dictatorship. And since I've been fighting off the mammals for the past couple seasons, I suppose it's only fair that the insect world resume its quest for domination. First we had the great potato bug plague of 2010 and now, now the tomato horn worm has made a reappearance.

Oh the irony. Oh the humanity. Because I took a chance on the rave reviews of the heirloom brandywine tomato plant, I was forced to pull my borage, as the tomato plant went all jack-in-the-beanstalk on me. It needed more room and so I pulled the one thing that has stood between my garden's tomatoes and the hornworm who wants to destroy them. And so the hornworm obviously took this removal of the borage as a vacancy sign and set-up shop.

In case you are new here let's just say in previous pre-borage years I have railed about how I loathe those puffy, squiggly overgrown bits 'o grossness. But I am also scared of them. And so I have waited for the wasps to come and save me by laying their eggs in the worms, thus causing them to die while I stand around with my martini and laugh. But this year, I am fueled by rage.This year, I have come to the realization that they cannot fly into my hair and become entangled (childhood trauma involving a fly apparently) because they cannot fly. And so I have been pulling those mo-fos off my plants and either popping them into a nice bucket of soapy water to drown a hopefully slow painful death or storing them in containers to give to my friend's chickens where she has assured me she is videotaping the torment of the worm as it is ripped to shreds by beaks and claws. It is on.