aliens?

It is lovely and warm here. Not yet too warm for me, but we are going through lots of ice and water every single day. And with warm summer weather comes aliens of all sorts. Claire and I have picked off the potato beetles and their larva on quite a few mornings. Potoates continue to amaze us. You put a bit of a potato in the earth, and not much later there is this, green on top and lots of potatoes underneath:

And now that the tomatoes are starting to come in, we will spend our mornings between 2 crops: potato beetles and tomato hornworms. In this picture are a few green tomatoes that fell to the ground. Along with the tomatoes is a green thing, about the size of my pinky finger. It is covered in little white things. The green is the hornworm, and the white thing the eggs of a parasitic wasp. It is not easy in the animal/plant world!

And also under the category of alien is this plant. It has sprung up behind the pig pen, and is a total volunteer. There is a fruit on it, Homer thinks it is a melon of some kind, but it was not intentionally planted by us. Rest assured we will eat it!

And every so often we find one of these bugs. They look fierce with those giant fake eyes, and might be dangerous, but we love to put them down on their backs and them have them snap up in the air to get back to the right size. Farm fun with bugs!