Working in the garden today

With the rain that came early this morning, I thought after I got the cows and chickens fed that I’d pull a couple weeds and dead plants out of the garden. I knew that it was a job that needed to get done. I’m not sure how you are, but with this type of a job..I really needed to be in the mood to even start this whole process. Well, my thought was to only clean up the front part of the garden and once I got started, I thought… just keep going. I was going to wear gloves and then I knew that it probably wouldn’t make much difference anyway. With the gloves that I have, my hands get just about as dirty! Well, after I started I was on a roll. I kept going and then I found this really cool caterpillar. I didn’t know if it was a good one or not for the garden so I put him in the wagon with the junk from the garden just in case he was a good kind. So now after the third one that I found, I thought that I should take a picture of it and find out just what in the heck it was.

Green Horned Caterpillar

When I was taking the picture this wasp kept kind of attacking it and I was shooing it off so it wouldn’t hurt it. OK, that was a mistake. This caterpillar is called a green horned caterpillar and it eats tomatoes! Yea, and I was trying not to hurt it. And the wasp that I was trying to shoo off? It helps get rid of these caterpillars out of your garden by laying eggs on it. Then as the eggs hatch, they eat the caterpillar to death.

I guess I should have left this wasp on it

Now that’s kind of gross, but whatever it takes. Oh well, my huge caterpillars are safe and living in the weed wagon right now, but at least they aren’t in the garden anymore.   After what I thought was going to be a short visit to the garden turned out to be a little bit longer and I ended up getting it cleaned up pretty good.

For now, it's pretty clean

I couldn’t figure out why my finger nails hurt so bad, and I just thought that I had so much dirt jammed up in them that it was making my nails bend back or something. I wasn’t sure.. but then I DID find out that they were hurting because I had slivers underneath the nails. Yea! Slivers! No wonder they hurt so bad. So I pulled the slivers out and now they hurt even worse. Now I’m sure that if I wasn’t such a big baby about it, it probably wouldn’t hurt so bad. But for now… it still hurts and I guess I should have worn gloves after all.

Slivers under your nails ~ not cool

I also was able to get Kyle’s birthday box mailed to him in New York. I wanted to send some beef jerky to him, but I sent the last double batch back to college with William. So I quick made another batch last night and I wish I would have kept track just how many batches of jerky that I’ve made these past couple of years. I’m thinking that it would be a lot!

Next two batches of beef jerky going to New York this time

It was weird though to mail his birthday box to him in the states. I didn’t need any custom paperwork or anything. I hope he gets it before the weekend. The last box that I sent to him in Canada took 15 days. It was priority mail and I just couldn’t believe that it took that long. When I would send him boxes in Korea, he would get them in 5 or 6 days. So it’ll be interesting to see how long it takes the priority mail in the states.

Kyle's birthday card