Three More Seedlings Planted During Cutworm Paradise

Tomato-wise, it was a quiet work week. On Friday my wife watered the front yard tomato plants and the plants in the "south garden". Also, she put cages on the plants on the "koi pond".

On Sunday she watered the rest of the back yard tomato plants. We should be watering more often but what can I say? We're busy with life. It's all good. The tomato plants are doing quite well, thank you.

We did plant three containers Sunday evening. The seedlings planted were Juliet, Sweet 100 and Rosella Purple.

My wife insisted that the soil preparation be done on the patio. That was different. I probably asked four times to make sure that's what she wanted.

"Yes, dump the soil on the patio."

"You realize that's on concrete. That'll be harder to clean up."

"Yes, of course. We're going to redo the pots using the same dirt, We'll add a lot of potting soil and planter mix. What we won't do is mix it with other garden dirt. That way we won't bring in any diseases and other unwanted items from our soil into the containers."

Ah, the light goes on.

The first two pots were handled as expected. The dirt in the third pot, however, was noticeably drier than the first two. That in and of itself didn't mean anything. When I dumped the dirt onto the patio I noticed moist soil at the bottom and adult cutworms. I found more just by turning the dirt with the added amendments.

So my wife used a hand shovel to go through the soil before placing it into the container. I'd scoop a pile, place in front of her and she'd sift it. Laborious, but effective. And yes, we found more cutworms. We found 26 adult sized cutworms in the dirt before we had filled the container. There was more dirt remaining on the patio but we had no more light. But that's not a misprint. 26 adult cutworms (and probably more) were in one container. Bleah!

I suspect this container doesn't drain as well as the other two. Maybe that's why the other two containers just had soil while the this container was a cutworm paradise.