No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

This is an off-the-farm story, but it was so absolutely hilarious and country,  am going to share….at my own expense.

So, yesterday, we finished up this monster garage sale.  The temperature was almost 100 degrees by the end of the day.  We were hot, tired, and thoroughly soaked in sweat.  My mascara had migrated to my neck.  My clothes bore the dirt and dust of eight hours of a yard sale.  After depositing the last truckload (third) of leftovers at Goodwill, we decided to run into Rusk for a six pack of SOMETHING.  Honestly, at that point, it didn’t even matter, just as long as it was cold, and had some kind of alcohol content.  This is what we do in Texas after a long, hot day.  It just is.

Anyway, we were well on our way, when we noticed a couple, probably in their late 50s or so, with a flat tire.  The man was under the truck, and the woman was standing by, trying to assist her husband.  The entire situation just screamed, “We need some help”, so we turned around and got out.  Here we are, on the side of an extremely busy, dangerous highway.  The man was trying to free the spare from underneath the truck and couldn’t get it loose.  You could see the anxiety in the woman’s face.  Bear in mind, it’s also about 100 degrees, with the pavement being much more than that.  Jason asked if we could help, and when he told the man he knew how to get the spare loose, you could see the relief in their faces.  So the man shimmied out from under the truck, and I swear, for a second, I thought he was either going to pass out or get sick.  Jason works in an un-airconditioned shop all year, so he is very used to the heat.  This man worked indoors for his job, as we found out, so I’m really glad that we got there in time before he had a stroke or something.

So, the tire was changed, the couple gave Jason some Gatorade and hand wipes and ‘Thanks’, and we were walking back to our truck.  The grass this time of year is very tall on the sides of the highways.  I was in a long skirt.  I stopped just in time to see a huge black widow on one of the stalks of grass where I was about to step.  Whew!  Deadly spider bite averted.  What I did NOT avert, apparently, was a huge pissed-off mound of fire ants. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with fire ants, consider yourselves fortunate.  Each sting is like a tiny ember of fire on your skin.  Jason opened my door (as he always does), and I felt fire all over my feet.  CRAP!  FIRE ANTS!  I was brushing them off as fast as I could, when I noticed they were not just on my feet, but my arms, hands, and ALL OVER MY CLOTHES. 

Ok, big decision here.  Should I:

A.  Keep brushing off the unknown quantity of ants, and try my best to keep my panic level under control, whilst keeping on my clothing in the company of strangers, or,

B. Rip off my clothes in a never-before-seen manner, whilst flinging them around frantically, like a rabid spider monkey.

Well, you guessed it, I chose “B”. 

I ripped off my skirt in about a nanosecond, threw it at Jason, frantically brushing the ants off of my legs, torso, and shirt, all in the presence of two absolutely complete strangers WHO NOW HAVE OUR BUSINESS CARD.

I prayed to God that they didn’t see too much of what was going on, but I don’t know what all they DID see, and I didn’t really care at the moment.  At least I was wearing undergarments!  As we took off, I hung my ant-filled skirt out the window at 70 miles per hour, still trying to dislodge ants.  A helluva way to end a day!

What’s up, my peeps?

This was my first official attempt at hatching chicken eggs.  I used a Little Giant incubator, with no fan, but with an auto egg turner.  Temperature was kept at 99.5 degrees as much as possible, and humidity was kept rather low (called a dry hatch) at about 35-40 percent.  After 21 days, here’s what happened:

This tiny break in the shell is called a ‘pip’ (above pic).  The baby chick has broken through the inner membranes to make a tiny hole, and to put a tiny crack in the shell.  Baby chicks will remain in this phase for as long as a day.  You have to remember that the chick has been scratching non-stop for hours with the tiny ‘egg tooth’ on their beak to get to this point.  They need some rest!

 Here’s the next phase.  The chick has now opened up the pip and is enlarging the hole.  He’s getting ready to…..

ZIP!  This is my favorite part of the hatching process.  You can see that his sibling is eagerly awaiting his arrival.  The ‘zip’ stage is where the chick literally zips all the way around the egg.  This part goes fairly quickly.  That baby chick is READY to get outta there now.

 

 The chick shoves the zipped eggshell as hard as he can, and:

He’s out of there!  Now it’s just time to dry off, which takes several hours.

My hatching percentage wasn’t great at all…likely due to the fact I was inexperienced with hatching bird eggs (I have hatched reptile eggs 100% in the past).  This time around, I am trying a higher humidity level since I went and checked humidity with a hygrometer under a brooding hen and found it to be around 60%.  I’m currently setting more eggs at 99.5 to 100 degrees with the humidity around 50-52% and at the 2 week check, which was yesterday, I only had 2 eggs not develop further after my Week 1 check, so I’m excited!  Right now I have 11 ‘Easter egger’ eggs and 4 Silkie cross eggs. 

Here are more post-hatch images:

Here is the shell after a good hatch.  There are 2 inner membranes in the shell.  The first one closest to the chick contains the blood vessels which have sustained the chick in utero, if you will.  It is a very thin, clear membrane.  The next membrane is a tough, whitish membrane.  If the chick takes too long to hatch, this membrane will dry out too much, causing the chick to suffocate/die in the shell.  This is another reason why correct humidity is so critical.  You’ll see that there is a little pink…this is just where the vessels were.  The chick absorbs the blood which was in them during the hatching process.  This is why you CANNOT just peel a chick who is almost ready to hatch out of the shell.  Doing so will cause massive hemorrhaging and death to the chick.  I have ‘helped’ some chicks hatch, but it is an extremely slow, delicate procedure that must be done in gradual phases, over the course of many hours.

Now here’s some cute and fluffy pics of the chicks at a few days old.  The black chicks, which are Barred Plymouth Rocks, are not the ones I hatched myself.

And, how do YOU do?

A very special thanks to the Swanson family for allowing me to hatch their eggs!

Where’s Wayward?

A few months back, I got some Polish chickens from the feed store.  Polish are a breed with a so-called ‘top hat’, which is just a big ball of feathers atop their little heads, which pretty much make the chicken look like a creature with a chicken body with a lollipop stick head and neck.  Really, it looks very similar to a Dr. Seuss Truffula Tree, stuck on a bird’s body. That’s a bit more accurate.  Anyway, due to the large ball of feathers on their head, their vision tend to be partially, if not almost fully, occluded.  Enter Wayward.

Wayward Jones is a White Crested Black Polish. This means she is primarily a black chicken with a white poof on top of her head.  I knew Wayward was ‘special’ pretty much from the start.  During their first outdoor excursions, Wayward would always end up where the other chickens WEREN’T, crying desperately for someone to come and find her.  When I did go to retrieve her, she was usually so happy to see someone, she would run and jump into my hands and up my arm. 

One morning as we were leaving, we were almost out the gate when we saw a certain chicken over in the orchard who came running to the truck.  Mind you, the others were on the complete opposite side of the house, and this is really a pretty good clip away.  I’m not good with distance, but let’s just say it was a ways away!  Again, she was so happy, she ran to me and I deposited her with the other chicks. 

This scenario has repeated itself dozens of times over the last several weeks.  One day, I found Wayward in a shrub at dusk, so lost she just gave up calling and roosted.  The other day, I found her roosting on the back of a plastic toy dump truck.  The last straw was last Saturday when I was hanging our laundry to dry on our deck.  I saw a bird WAAAAAAAY down the hill behind our house, almost to the creek, and believe me, it’s a long way for a little chicken to go.  I looked at it for a minute, thinking it looked an awful lot like a guinea (which I do not have anymore, they are in the freezer now), before realizing who it was.  My shoulders slumped and I shook my head.  I thought to myself: One day, I’m going to get a collect call from Mexico, they’re going to connect me, and there will be nothing but clucking on the other end, and I’m gonna know EXACTLY who it is. I can foresee the conversation….

Me:  Sure, I’ll accept a collect call.

WJ: Booooooock???  Bock, Bock?

Me:  Wayward?  Is it you? You’ve been gone for weeks!

WJ: BOCK!  Booock, bock, bock, bock

Me: Well, I’m glad you’re OK, but what are you doing in Mexico?

WJ: Bock, bock, bock, booock, bock.

Me:  You got arrested for WHAT?  Where does a chicken hide drugs?

WJ: Bock, boooock, bock, bock, booock

Me: (irritated) OK, look, I don’t want to know any more about it. We’re not telling Jason, and we’re never speaking of this again.  I’ll pick you up in a week.

(connection ends)

 So, I flagged down Jason, who was blowing off the driveway.  I said, “Come look at THIS.”  He said, “Ok, where’s Wayward?”  Does that give you ANY idea how routine this is? I could have been asking him to come look at anything on earth, but he knew it was Wayward, right off the bat.

So, I went and retrieved Wayward yet again, but this time I had a plan.  I took a hairband and made her a ponytail (chickentail?) out of her head feathers.  She went into a slight stage of shock, then surprise.  She ran around in circles, so excited she could finally see something other than the backside of those feathers.  This is the story of Wayward Jones the Polish chicken.

Super Fantastic Cat Alarm 5000

The other day, I adopted a housecat.  I have only had a housecat once in my adult life…for about a month (he was pretty much dumped in my lap and loved to dump on my bath rugs, so I found him another home).  Anyway, we found ‘Garfield’ on Craigslist.  Strangely, he was only about 3 minutes from our house. 

Garfield is the funniest-looking cat I have ever laid eyes upon.  He is an Exotic Shorthair, which is basically a Persian with shorter hair and a perfectly flat face.  I mean, really flat.  Here is is, performing ‘cat yoga’:

Not only does he look funny, his personality is hilarious. 

If Garfield is hungry, he meows.  If Garfield is thirsty, he meows.  If the litterbox is not properly cleaned, he meows.  And, if you are not graciously lavishing him with attention, he meows.  No doubt about it, this is a cat who knows what he wants in life.

So, the other day, I was attempting to sleep in on a Saturday.  At 6:45am, the ‘cat alarm’ has apparently been activated and I wake up to SNIFF SNIFF SNIFF right in my face and crack open my eyes, and Garfield is about 1/2″ from my nose.  “Garfield! Go find something else to do!”  I flip on my stomach and cover my head with a pillow.  Then comes: PUUUUUURRRRRPUUUUURRRRRPUUUUUURRRRR from deep in his little cat chest, so loud that it is now vibrating the coils in my bed and the noise penetrates my skull.  “GARFIELD, PLEASE!” Silence.  Then comes a large, furry critter jumping in the very center of my back, making small circles.  “Meow?  Meow? (DON’T YOU KNOW I’M HUNGRY, YOU STUPID HUMAN!)”  I try to ignore the fact that a huge ball of fur is making figure 8’s on my backside.  Silence.  Suddenly, I feel one of the straps on my pajama top being chewed.  Chomp, chomp, ‘meooooow’, ‘meooooow’.  I give up.  I am now slave to the cat, and give him his kibble. 

No better alarm than a hungry cat.

Rainwater Harvesting

Here is my late spring herb garden, picture was taken today.  In it, I have several kinds of thyme, rosemary, horehound (I’m not making that up), oregano, dill, catnip, catmint, basil, chives, and sage.

So!  For the last several weeks, we have had NO RAIN.  I mean, I was starting to really get worried there for a while.  Typically, our April/May months provide a pretty good amound of rain to tide us through the beginning of summer.  I cursed myself for not collecting more rainwater when it was more plentiful.  I have been collecting rainwater in plastic trash cans for several years now, though not very efficiently. I tend to forget about them…but not this year!  I used my gathered rainwater exclusively for my baby tomatoes this year. 

Anyway, after this mini dry spell, I really got to thinking about water usage and collection.  I mean…almost on the verge of obsessively thinking about it.  How much water do I use washing eggs?  How much do I use in the shower, or bath, or rinsing plates? 

There was a good reason for our grandparents using a ‘dishpan’.  I so happen to have two ‘dishpans’ and so now when I am washing eggs, or rinsing plates, I have been dutifully collecting the runoff and putting it in my garden.  This water is called ‘greywater’.  Your water that is used in your potty is called ‘blackwater’.  Anyway, there is definitely a lot for me to learn about re-using greywater.  I hope, one day, to have my kitchen and shower water diverted to my gardens.  Today, I even scooped out the bathwater after the kiddos got out.  This is NOT something you want to apply to a veggie/herb you will eat raw, though…..as, well, you know…there are ‘booty germs’ in it, but still, it watered the daylily garden anyway. 

Well, so the other day, we got a really nice rain.  I ran like mad to set out all my water collection buckets (read: anything that would hold water).  It’s amazing the amount of water that runs off of a building during a good storm!  We had tons of water, which we deposited into a couple of our water trashcans.  I also went and bought an aquarium gravel siphon @ WallyWorld, to, theoretically siphon out bath water (note to Self: the law of physics prevent this from happening in the manner I had hoped.  So I failed Siphons 101)  So, today I was walking around our shop, and we have 2 jet skis that we are keeping for someone.  The place where your feet ride was FULL of rainwater.  Well, so….I took my siphon and my trusty 5 gallon buckets:

And, out of all 4 footwells, I got almost 20 gallons of water!  So then, I took that, carried it to one of my trash barrels, threw a piece of screening that I found on the side of the road (I KNEW I’d find a use for it!!!) and poured the water through, to screen out the yucky stuff:

My future plans are to utilize some 55 gallon drums into an official rainwater gathering system. 

Water restrictions can happen anywhere at any time, so I want to do my best to be prepared for the worst.  Yay for saving free water!

Creepy Crawlies

Even as a very young child, I have always been attracted to the ‘creepy crawlies’ of Nature.  Snakes, spiders, insects, invertebrates…whatever most people had nightmares about, I was usually out catching them with my faithful bug net. 

I think about my elementary school playground teacher, Mrs. Brown.  Poor Mrs. Brown.  Mrs. Brown probably had some sort of insect phobia (unbeknownst to me) and I was always trying to hand Mrs. Brown all sorts of insects in the schoolyard.  “But, Mrs. Brown, they won’t hurt you!”, I would plead.  She would graciously turn down my tent caterpillar, grasshopper, etc.  I am not sure if she ever did eventually hold any of my prized finds.  Anyway, Mrs. Brown was in the same Sunday school class as my Mamaw and would always tell her how I was forever trying and trying to get her to hold one of my critters and how I would chase boys with worms. 

Anyway, I am proud to say that my own little ones are fairly fearless around invertebrates, and little Zoe carried around a poor tent caterpillar for days, calling it, “my little friend”.  Tent caterpillars, though somewhat destructive to some trees, have always intrigued me.  Honestly, they look like a crawling Oriental rug.  Their patterns are so complex and beautiful.  Here is one of Zoe’s ‘little friends’:

Of course, these little guys do not possess stinging hairs, however many caterpillars DO and some are extremely painful, so be sure you know what you’re picking up!  Here is another little guy  I found on one of our gates the other day. 

 

Generally, the more colorful the caterpillar, the best it is to NOT TOUCH. Not always true, though, as in the case of the potentially dangerous Puss caterpillar ,  which is what your grandparents call an ‘asp’.  I remember Mamaw nearly having a heart attack when I found a Wooly Bear larvae one day beside her house.  “Asp! Asp!  You stay away from that!” as my Papaw ground the poor little Wooly Bear into oblivion.  Naturally, I had to run into the house and grab my favorite book, my Reader’s Digest North American Wildlife identification book, only to discover that Wooly Bears are completely harmless.  Oh well.  You will often see Wooly Bears crossing the road in the fall.

Anyway, here is a neat little spider I found today, hanging out on my dill:

They may be creepy and crawly, but they all really do serve a purpose!  Well, maybe except cockroaches.  I can do without the cockroaches!  But, seriously, I don’t use pesticides for the simple fact that they indiscriminately kill bugs, whether they are ‘pests’ or not.  When you kill one link in the chain of life, the chain can’t go on.

Goodbye Tom, hello sausage

As you may have read earlier in my blog, I butchered my first turkeys earlier this year.  I am going to give you a step by step on how I made some turkey breakfast sausage and some ground turkey.  Here we go!

All you need for turkey sausage:  I used a meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid, a big ol’ bowl of turkey chopped into 1.5″ pieces, a roll of pork sausage (they were out of plain ol’ fat), and another big bowl to catch the ground meat. 

 

 Most of the turkey was breast meat, but I did have some leg meat in there.  I chopped into 1-1.5 inch cubes to feed into the grinder, and I seasoned with a sausage recipe I found on Allrecipes.  Mostly, it was salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, and some red pepper.  I don’t remember the rest, but if you look up breakfast sausage on most any recipe site, you’ll find something that looks tasty.  You also need to stick your meat in the freezer for about 30 minutes prior to grinding.  It makes it a LOT easier to pass through the grinder.  The metal face plates should also be stuck in the freezer as well.

 Here I am feeding the meat into the grinder via a wooden plunger (tip: don’t use your fingers unless you really just don’t like them)  Anyway, first, you grind with a coarse grinding plate (which you have stuck in the freezer beforehand, and you will finish with a fine plate. For some grinds, you can just get by with the coarse plate, though.  The only difference is that the fine plate has smaller holes through which the meat passes.  Anyway, you just put the chunks in the feeder, plunge it down, and it comes out all nice and ground!  When I made the sausage, I did use some pre-made Jimmy Dean pork sausage, and as I ground, I just added it in here and there.  Turkey is very lean, so it needs a little fat to get that sausage just right.  You will also notice a skillet in this picture…when I was done with a ‘pass’ through the grinder the first time, we fried up a little to give it a taste test.  This way, you can correct your spices before you send it through the fine grind.

Coarse grind:

Fine grind:

So then I just made them into sausage patties, and stored them on waxed paper, stacked, in a freezer Ziploc.  For the plain ground turkey, we didn’t season at all, and rolled them into 1/2 pound balls, storing them also in freezer Ziplocs.  And that was all there was to that!   A lot easier than I thought. 

For the final picture, a word:

You know those vintage ads, where the woman always has this shocked, yet pleasantly surprised face?  As if the Good Lord himself came down and handed this woman a blender/coffee/toothpaste/oven/etc?  For whatever reason, I ‘do’ this face in photos.  Unfortunately, I turn my “vintage ad face” up WAAAAAAY too much and end up looking like a psychopathic version. I could darn near be grinding up my husband/dog/mother in law in this picture, judging by my face. Oh well.  Do enjoy.

Guineas and such….

I feel bad that I have not been putting many pictures on lately, and you poor readers just get to stare at a bunch of words.  I promise…next post, more pictures, OK?

Now, let me tell you about guinea fowl.  Last year I purchased 4 guinea chicks (called ‘keets’) from the feed store.  My friend, Rachel, was quick to inform me how much she couldn’t stand guineas.  So I thought, how bad could they really be?  Well, I found out.

At first, guineas are fairly quiet birds as they are maturing.  However, as they age, they begin to make a sound which only increases in decibels incrementally until it is the same decibel level as, oh, 30 jet engines being turned on simultaneously.  At first, they do not make the noise much, but as they age and get used to their environment, they will sound their alarm at….pretty much everything.

For those of you new to guineas, let me tell you what they do not like.  Guineas do not like things with wheels, children, dogs, cats, strangers, buzzards overhead, moving leaves, and falling pine needles.  They do not like it when you walk quickly, are carrying something in your hands, clouds, fences, shrubs, and I am pretty sure they don’t like the air, either.  You will know they are displeased when they all collectively shriek like a horde of banshees:  “ACKAKAKAKAKAAKAKAKAKAKAKAKAKAACCCCCK”!!!!!!!!!!

We had visitors this weekend, and since they drove up in a car (thing with wheels), brought children, and were strangers, the guineas immediately voiced their unhappiness with an hour long tirade of intermittent screaming and shrieking.  They are so loud (and I only had 4), that my guest covered her ears and said, “What IS that?”, to which I replied, “Something that will be going in the freezer tomorrow.”  Which was actually true. 

For a few weeks the guineas (who are unproductive and do not contribute to anything around the farm), had been mercilessly chasing my chickens.  Now, the chickens produce, the guineas do not.  Rule #1 of the Farm is that everyone must serve a purpose.  You can see where I’m going with this.  So, one day, the guineas got after our beautiful Silkie rooster and pulled out some tail feathers.  Jason happened to be watching with me, and when I turned around to say something, he was already in the coop.  He screamed at the guineas, “You’re not going to chase MY DAMN SILKIE!” I tried not to laugh.  I really did.  But the image of this six foot tall, linebacker of a man defending a 2 pound chicken that looks like a stack of pompoms was just too much.  I’m really considering making a T-shirt with Jason’s face and a Silkie, with his quote right above the pictures.

He snatched up the offending guinea, looked right in his eyes, and I wasn’t quite sure the guinea was going to make it out of that one alive.  SO!  We set a date for the end of the guineas. 

Thus, this past Sunday was designated Butchering Day.  It actually went extremely well. I have never butchered a whole bird before, so it was a whole new thing to me.  First, you kill them and ‘bleed them out’, that is, you hang them upside down and let the blood drain out (we beheaded them, actually).  Then I ran them over to a stockpot which was preheated with 150 degree water.  You have to add a little bit of dish soap to the water to break the surface tension, so that the feathers get wet.  Then you swish around the bird for about 10 seconds, and I took a little piece of pipe and ran it against the feathers on the leg.  When the feathers just fall right off, you must immediately snatch the bird out of the hot water (or it will burn off the skin), and dunk it in a bucket of ice water to stop the cooking process.  Then you just pluck the bird, and the feathers literally slide out just like magic.  SO easy.  Then comes evisceration (gutting) and that was actually really not too messy and wasn’t gross at all to me.  Surprisingly all of the innards, with exception of the lungs, come out in one easy motion.  It sure was an interesting experience!  I watched a video of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms on YouTube to ‘see’ the whole process.  He can completely gut a chicken in 20 seconds!  So, now I have guinea in the freezer, and none in my yard.  From this day forward, this is how it shall always be. 

Oh, you’ll read articles which tell you how great guineas are at keeping away snakes and ticks.  The only thing my guineas managed to chase away was my sanity.  Give me a chicken or a duck any day of the week, thank you very much!

Flip Flops + Country = No no

Why is it that I stubbornly hold onto the idea that flip flops are acceptable footwear for the country?  Even after the fact that last year, I found thorns in my ff’s long enough to sew with, which had not only impaled my ff’s, but also my big toe.  Even after the fact that every time I go outside, either my kids, husband, or 100 lb. dog step on the back of them and I go hurdling through the air like a wayward stork.  Even after my toes have been permanently bruised and smashed to the point I can no longer wear boots.  Even after they make my feet look like a Neanderthal’s and I develop semi-permanent dirt stains and a callus that has to be sanded down with a belt sander.  What is the attraction?

You have to be delusional to think that flip flops are even remotely ok for any kind of task around here.  Even when I am giving hay to the animals, inevitably a piece of hay will get under my foot and jab me like a grass toothpick.  I just do not understand why I can’t grasp the reality of the situation.  Funny story…

A few years back, we had bought a house next door to us in town (see?  I don’t do well with close neighbors).  I was working on painting it one summer day (in my ff’s, of course.  Yeah, that’s safe footwear for a ladder). One of those famous Texas thunderstorms popped up out of nowhere.  I had to run back to my house to grab another brush.  The lightning and thunder were growing in intensity, so I was running (in my ff’s….stuuuuupid) and as I rounded the corner to the house, a huge crack of thunder erupted just overhead as my right foot simultaneously slid in the mud under my left leg, knocking my left foot off of the ground and I think it ended up somewhere near my left ear.  The next thing I remember, I was eating some monkey grass and dirt, still clutching my paintbrush in my right arm, which was now straightened behind my head.  I am pretty sure it was some kind of yoga pose for experts….or maybe just a nitwit.  Mind you, it is still raining (pouring) all over me, and I am now in the mud, getting wet, in a severe thunderstorm, eating grass. 

You would have thought I’d learned my lesson then.  I guess some people just never learn.

Cut that out!

If you have been reading my blog, you will know that this year is the first year I have started tomatoes from seed.  If you have never done it before, you cannot realize how much you get attached to a plant. 

When the seeds first broke the soil, I clapped my hands in excitement.  When they put out their first set of leaves, I gathered my family around to celebrate.  I somehow managed to keep them from being mutilated even though they are in a house with my husband, 2 kids, and 2 crazy dogs.  I babied them like I have never babied a plant before, making sure they only had organic fertilizer with rain water.  I talked to them and petted their leaves gently, and we talked about how many tomatoes they would give me in return for my diligent efforts (hey, what goes on in the greenhouse, STAYS in the greenhouse!). When the time came, on Easter, that they were to leave their pots forever, I think I had a tear in my eye as I lovingly patted them into their compost rich beds.

So, imagine my horror when the other day I was strolling through the garden, checking up on ‘everyone’, and one of my Snowberry tomato plants was….gone.  My mind was reeling and I felt nauseated.  I fell to my knees, sobbing, crying to God “Why, oh whyyyyyy????” (ok, not really) and there I saw the culprit.  A cutworm.  He was happily STILL MUNCHING on my precious, heirloom, spoiled Snowberry tomato plant.  He saw me coming and tried to duck back into the ground.  Nope, that just ain’t happening.  You do the crime, you’re gonna pay the time!  I ripped him out of the ground, calling him a very vulgar name which I will not repeat here (and, after all, I did feel a little bad about saying it… I mean, maybe cutworms DO know who their fathers are, after all?) and gave him an immediate conviction sans trial.  The punishment?  Death by chicken.  It was the worst possible thing I could think of.  While I would have loved to smear him into the grass, the thought of allowing a chicken to peck him to death, while throwing him several times in the air made me giddy. 

He in still in death row, sitting in a little glass bowl.  Execution will be today at high noon for those who wish to attend.  No funeral has been scheduled, however, in lieu of flowers/plants/casseroles, a donation may be made to the Tomatoes Cut Down In Their Prime fund.