The day after a holiday weekend always feels like hitting a reset button. The visitors have gone home, the special meals are reduced to leftovers, and the garden — well, the garden doesn’t care about our calendars or celebrations. It just keeps growing, existing in its own timeline.
This morning, coffee in hand, I wandered out to check on my tomato plants. The unseasonable warmth we’ve had this past week has accelerated everything. The plants that were just promising little green nubs a few weeks ago are now reaching skyward with the kind of optimism only plants seem capable of maintaining consistently.
But I’m not the only one who’s noticed their vigorous growth. My tomato plants have admirers — small, fuzzy, voraciously hungry admirers. Caterpillars.
There they were, contentedly munching away at leaves that I had carefully tended, watered, and spoken encouraging words to for weeks. My first reaction, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, was decidedly unphilosophical. It was something closer to betrayal, as if these creatures and I were engaged in some kind of personal dispute over custody of chlorophyll.
In larger agricultural operations, the solution would be simple: chemicals. Kill the invaders. Protect the crop. Move on. But in my small patch, where every plant has a name (don’t judge) and every square foot is intimately known, such scorched-earth tactics feel wrong. Not just environmentally, but spiritually.
This is the paradox of the small patch gardener. We are close enough to our plants to develop attachment, to feel personally offended when something goes wrong. We don’t have the emotional distance that acres would provide.
So what’s a chemical-free gardener to do?
First, I’ve been handpicking the caterpillars I find and relocating them to a wild patch at the edge of my property. Call it a deportation program with humanitarian principles. It’s time-consuming but oddly satisfying work, requiring the kind of attentiveness that modern life rarely demands of us. You have to really look at your plants, understand their structure, notice the subtle signs of distress.
I’ve also planted marigolds as companion plants. Their scent repels certain pests, though I suspect the caterpillars didn’t get that particular memo. Still, the bright orange and yellow blooms make the garden more visually interesting, which counts for something when you’re spending increased time bent over, searching for tiny creatures.
A mixture of water and dish soap in a spray bottle helps too, though you have to be diligent about application. It’s not an instant fix — more like a gentle suggestion to the caterpillars that perhaps they should reconsider their dining choices.
But beyond these practical measures, there’s a deeper lesson here about coexistence and patience. These caterpillars, after all, are future butterflies and moths. They’re not evil; they’re hungry. They’re following their nature just as surely as my tomato plants are following theirs. The contradiction is not in nature but in my expectations of how nature should behave to suit my purposes.
The small patch garden teaches this lesson repeatedly: we are not in control. We can influence, suggest, nurture, and protect, but ultimately we are participants in something larger than our plans. The caterpillar and I are engaged in a relationship, not a war — even if it sometimes feels like the latter when I see those ragged-edged leaves.
Summer is indeed coming to northern Florida. The air has that particular heaviness that promises months of thick heat ahead. The insects know it before we do — their urgency to feed and breed increases with the temperature. My task now is not to fight this reality but to find my place within it, to protect my plants while respecting the natural order that includes creatures whose purposes don’t align with mine.
Tomorrow I’ll be out there again, coffee in hand, looking for caterpillars among the leaves. It’s not just garden maintenance; it’s a practice in paying attention, in being present enough to notice the small dramas unfolding in my small patch. And that kind of attention, I’m convinced, is what makes a garden more than just a place where vegetables grow. It makes it a place where we grow too.
In the meantime, those tomatoes are getting taller by the day. With any luck, there will be enough harvest to share — not with the caterpillars, preferably, but you never know. In a small patch garden, compromise is just another word for wisdom.