Gardening Faux Pas

I was smart enough to catch my prankster cousin when he tried to tell me that you should pull the blooms off tomato plants to produce larger fruit. But today I did something that just makes me sick (well, not as bad as spraying 60 tomato plants with Roundup as the aforementioned cousin did, but devastating nonetheless).


The boys and I wandered out to our dying garden, and I noticed that two of my parsley plants and my dill had been completely eaten. I then noticed some striped caterpillar-like creatures on another parsley plant.
I quickly picked them off (6 or 7). After consulting the "pests" section of my Southern Living garden book, I determined they must be some sort of cutworm, and the boys attempted to drown them in a bucket of water.


We all went inside but when I returned to fetch some stray toys, I noticed that Stephen had dumped them back into the flower bed. I grumbled as I picked them out and squished them. I then returned and looked up "parsley" in my reference book and found the following comment:


"Be merciful if you spot large caterpillars with black, green and yellow stripes munching on the leaves; these are the larvae of the stunning black swallowtail butterfly."



All that to save a bunch of parsley I'll probably never use.