Wednesday, July 29, 2009

An Uninvited Dinner Guest

It has been a particularly rainy summer in New England, but finally we have gotten some serious heat and sunshine. My arugula was not doing so well with getting drenched everyday, so was starting to look very sad, but with the steamier weather was starting to perk up a little.



Suddenly one morning this week, I went outside to water all my babies and found this!! Eeeeekkk! At first I thought we might have had some hail in the night that shredded the leaves, because this happened to one of my co-workers, but all of the other plants (tomatoes, basil, green beans and various flowers) looked fine.



So I took a closer look and found the culprit. Here is his mug shot.



I think he may be a Cabbage White Caterpillar, but does anyone have any other guesses?

Only one and he devoured all the arugula! He tried to escape the next morning. How rude! At least he can have the decency to stick around so I can see what he turns out to be! So I knocked him gently back into the container and laid some tomato leaves that I had pruned and some basil flowers to see if he would like to sample that buffet. He seemed to be quite picky and went right back to what was left of the arugula, so I guess it must have been pretty tasty.

Oh well. To drown my sorrows I went to a restaurant this week with a co-worker and ordered a crispy calamari, arugula and avocado pizza which was delicious.

2 comments:

nooschi said...

Yikes! Don't know what kind of worm that guy is but sucks about your arugula plant. I hate worms/caterpillars, and squirmed when I saw him. Cute little story though...made me laugh.

Jenny T. said...

Do you garden? This year has been a particularly bad year for creepy crawlies. It's been really rainy by the park near my house, so whenever I walk to the bus in the morning I have to dodge the hugest slugs and snails that I've ever seen! So far, no more vermin in my garden, so let's keep our fingers crossed!

My jalapenos are almost ready and there are so many of them. Which reminds me I have to research whether or not I can freeze jalapenos because I'm going on vacation soon!