Humble Garden

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(Please refer to this newer post for an update on our personal views on vaccination. We still very much advocate elderberry elixir, just not as the single means of fighting an increasingly virulent H1N1 pandemic)

Early on in the pandemic, a bit less recently, I immersed myself in flublogia. These are long standing flu communities, lots of intellectual capital out there.. people I really admire and who really know what is up with the pandemic (doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, scientists in the field and those not in it – like me, am not a viral biologist).

In one of my many-a-day strolls through the garden, I was looking at one of the tomato patches, lamenting the loss of most of the leaves on my calabash tomato to some sort of wilt (I hesitate to says its one thing, I am guessing various things are going on here) and I found, hanging from a tomato branch, this caterpillar beset by eggs and what looked like flying ants.

My first reaction was revulsion (OK, that remains my reaction) but I left it there because:

Radish leaf.

To a plant, water management is personal, very personal.

Capturing and managing the use or loss of water is not an idle activity, its not passive. For the plant it is hardwired. Just as we have arteries and veins to conduct blood, our little ocean, throughout our bodies, so too does the plant have tubing to route water across it’s body plan.

Corn sprout.