Death and Carnage in the Garden

Last week our garden suffered a great loss, the loss of 75% of our tomato plants and nearly all our winter squash. This is a photo of where some our plants once stood, about 20ish plants with hundreds of yellow, red, orange and mostly green tomatoes as well as a few almost veggie producing squash plants.
Here's a close-up of the carnage left behind with a lone tomato plant still standing in the background.
You may be thinking pestilence, famine, drought, disease, grasshoppers, thieves or localized twisters. I thought of all those things...luckily the culprits left a calling card.




Can you guess.





Come on, just take a guess.




No






You'd think right...but no.







Not even close....






Ahhh, you'll never guess.






Wait, did you say Mormon crickets....






Close.






Yes, missionaries.

Allow me to start from the beginning. We planted a garden in our neighbors yard. A single woman who had a lot of land, irrigation rights and an excellent watering system already in place. She asked if we wanted to garden in her yard in exchange we would help her clean up her yard. We invited our neighbors to join us and planted away. We quickly found organic gardening required far more time than we had...i.e without the use of weed killer, one has to actually weed. Eventually we just let them go, figured the garden and weeds could cohabitate...it's almost more "organic" that way;). It did ok, at least the green beans, fava beans, greens, carrots, onions, soy beans etc. didn't seem to mind. So, while there were lots of tomatoes and a few squash plants, the untrained eye may have only seen weeds.

Our neighbor was having some missionaries help her in her yard and instructed them to clear a path to the backyard through the garden. She stood on her porch, saw that the northern end of the garden looked like all weeds, told them to pull up that end...and they did...infact they did a really good job. Had it not been for all the squished tomatoes on the ground you would have never known there were tomatoes there at all. I called the neighbor to ask what happened to the tomatoes and she felt REALLY bad. She said the missionairies mentioned something about there being tomatoes but she was in a hurry and thought there might be a straggler or two and told them to weed on.

Alas we will miss our little tomatoes. I have to admit, I've already bottled enough this fall to last a lifetime so the loss is somewhat a relief for me, but not for all those I was going to share my tomatoes with. Still, I felt really bad about the loss, but as Melanie so graciously helped me realize "if anyting, it's really good blog material."