Well, apparently May is the month o’ vegetable pests.  The other day, I was looking at my tater plants when I noticed that a big chunk of leaves was missing.  Upon closer observation, I also noticed some big, fat somethings feasting merrily on my tater vines.  I ran into the house and discovered that they were the dreaded Colorado potato beetle.  The larva look somewhat like grotesque ladybugs.  The adults are actually a pretty striped beetle, about the size of a small June bug.  Unfortunately, they also enjoy feasting on MY taters, so I picked them all off by hand over a 2 day period.  So far, it has been about a week and a half and I have not seen any new ones.

Then, today, I saw that one of my tater vines was completely defoliated.  Now I had just checked out everything yesterday and all was well.  I bent down and found a HUGE tobacco hornworm munching away at my vines!  I picked him off, let the kids have a look-see, and fed the big thing to our turkeys, who were more than happy to gobble it up.  So, tonight, I’ll be on the hornworm hunt with a flashlight.  It’s always something!  I also think that a rabbit is munching on my roses.  Sigh.

Well, the chicken coop is about 95% done, thank you dear, sweet Lord!  Saturday, the chickens and our 20 pound turkeys were wallerin’ all in my beautiful herb garden and flattening everything.  It kindof freaked me out, seeing all of that hard work being destroyed, so yesterday, Jason worked non-stop on the coop until the little building was predator-proofed.  The most interesting thing about the coop is that it is made of virtually all recycled materials.  I promise to post a pic soon, because it is so cool!  Jason calls it Fort Cluck.  Anyway…

I found a really cool website for you all to look at:  http://www.maryjanesfarm.org/

I decided that’s who I wanna be when I grow up, lol.  Read her bio…she is a very interesting lady.  I am going to subscribe to the magazine, too. 

Toodle-oo…I’m off to hunt hornworms!