Hazards of Growing Tomatoes

An unexpected hazard has appeared in my tomato garden. The ubiquitous assasin bug which has heretofore concentrated on sucking the life out of unwanted insects, is now becoming agressive enough to attack me whenever I decide to pluck a ripe cherry tomato. Some of them are over an inch long and look mean enough to tell my grandmother that her apple pie is too sweet. Okay, in order to do that, they’d have to do a Bridey-Murphy thing. Still, it’s something I never dared to do, and that puts them up there with Hitler and Stalin. Mussolini was a wuss. My granny could have handled him easily.

I’ve now seen reports of significant injuries sustained after being bitten by an assasin bug, giving more credibility to their name than I’d care to admit. Foraging amongst my tomatoes for that best-and-sweetest globe is no longer the pleasure it was when I only had to dodge yellow jackets, wasps, and the neighbor’s cat.

Part of my garden is hydroponic, or used to be until the rain stopped and my storage tank ran dry. Now I add a bit of tap water to the system each day and hope for rain. Tonight I shall dig up the remaining carrots, vegetables that assasin bugs and pesky squirrels leave strickly alone. The carrots will go towards making a nice pot roast from the last chunk of venison in my freezer. Replinishment of protein will have to wait until the next unwanted deer electrocutes itself on the fence around the beet greens or walks into the freezer locker looking for fresh purselane–I exagerate, of course.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping one sample of an okra that so far has grown to be eleven inches long in three days. They don’t have a catagory for largest okra at the county fair. This one might outweigh the winning pumkin if I extrapolate how large it will be by October. My calculations indicate that it should be nine feet long and weigh close to three hundred pounds.