I Hate Worms: Cornpocalypse

When people say that they "hate worms" what do you normally think of?

Is it the brown and pink earthworm, buried under a pile of wet leaves?

The giant orange mucus-filled slime-bags from Tremors?

The red pinkie-sized fishing bait that tears up the fish when season's in? 

 

I love all of those worms, the pink and brown lovable earthworms especially. I'm a big fan of super cheesy Kevin Bacon movies, so let's even count the monstrously awful Tremors worms. The worms that I hate? They're not even worms. Technically, I think they are a kind of larvae. And there's actually more than one of those larvae that I hate. If it eats my vegetables, I am an equal opportunity hater. Today? I hate cutworms.

What I originally thought was pickleworm damage to this year's Spring crop of beets and spinach very quickly turned into cutworms the size of the tip of my pinkie, apparently when I pulled up the beets I didn't turn over enough soil. This revelation today made me think of all of the damage that "worms" have done to my garden over the last five planting seasons, and how I can prevent these horrible monsters from making a mess of my garden this year!

I've lost an entire 20-foot crop of cucumbers to evil powdery mildew in a week, nothing in my power could stop it. Thankfully I had a very good season up until that point. The pickles I learned to make were delicious and fun!

I've composted beefsteak tomatoes the size of my fist because of tomato horn-worms. I've nursed cucurbits of multiple varieties through blossom rot and plucked so many baby plants out of their dirt to become food for next year. Watched beautiful flowering squash plants turn to dust under the ministrations of pickleworms, squash bugs, and aphids. Soap spray, Sevin dust, water blasts, nothing could stop the onslaught.  I made some mistakes along the way (if you have issues with squash bugs do NOT put pallet wood trellises in your garden!!!)


Then, there was last year's Corn-pocalypse. It was my first time planting corn. The seedlings were a bit slow, but the stalks grew fast, they grew GREEN and they were beautiful. My kids were so proud of them! I was amazed and inspired by my success with them. Doesn't life look so perfect in the below pictures? I didn't know what kind of devastation I was in for.

I figured it was time for a status report on the ears. The stalks were at chest height, the ears were plump and firm, the ends no longer pointed, and the floss was stringy and almost completely dry. With the awestruck wonder of a child, I slowly opened up my first ear.....to a big squishy half-eaten mess. I recoiled in horror as a giant worm fell out of the space where the corn kernels had been. I ripped open another, and another, and another! Worms everywhere! My bright sunshine yellow kernels were streaked through with digested vegetable matter and worm crap. For lack of a better phrase, I. WAS. PISSED. I was so mad that I ripped up a whole stalk right out of the ground, and then I basically rage-quit on that part of the garden.

At that point, It only got worse. In the ground were these hard, white, disgusting pupae, they were corn-worms that had had their fill of my beautiful crop and had already dropped into the ground to burrow, waiting to turn into adult moths. I checked for more signs of damage in the rest of the stalks that I had left, nibbles here, boring holes there, leaves with bite marks, the infestation was massive. WHY HADN'T I NOTICED THIS? Partly out of revulsion (they're GROSS looking) and mostly out of anger, I ripped up all of my sixteen shoulder height corn stalks, sobbing the entire time, ugly crying, the kind of relentless sobbing you reserve for Ben & Jerry's and a horrible breakup.

I then turned over the entire 24 sq ft area that I had reserved for corn, and plucked every cocoon I found out of the soil. I put them in a Ziploc bag because I hadn't yet decided their fate. I knew it was going to be bad, I just didn't know how creative I wanted to get with it. [I'm sorry if you've eaten recently.] I smashed the bag once with my flat shovel, then tossed it into our neighbors trash trailer, hoping the sun would give them the same pain they caused me. 

 

A few days later I had recovered enough  to consider replanting in that spot. It was May, which in South Florida is the beginning of 4 months of 90+ degree temperatures EVERY. DAY. I knew that whatever I planted would either fry in the heat, or be a flower. I chose sunflowers, the GIANT kind, to replace the hole in my heart with their sunshining faces. I also learned that sunflowers provide an amazing amount of heat protection for the blistering summers here in Central Florida.
 

You'd think, after reading this, that no one should ever garden. It's too heartbreaking, too strenuous, the odds are never in your favor. You'd be wrong.
The point of this blog is to convince myself that each failure consists of a new tmro. Each drought, blight, infestation, fungus, or toddler-related gardening mishap can be rectified. If you expect results overnight, (and you plant from seed!) you'll be an emotional wreck in three weeks. But there's always tomorrow. :)