Invasion!

Ugh - it has been SOOOOO hot and humid all of July - and so far August seems to be going the same way.  To say it's been Guamish would be an insult to Guam - it has simply been miserable outside.  Ugh.  Bleh.  

And, despite the ridiculously high humidity, it has been dry!  No rain to speak of...until about a week ago, when we got over 4" in less than 24 hours (although just north about 10 miles, in Waterloo, they got over 7" from the same storms).  The heavy rains and gusting winds did a number on the corn, although it has mostly recovered now.  See the tassels?  I'm very excited that I might, for the first time, get corn from my garden!

Now, these photos are hazy for two reasons.  One, the air was hazy, thanks to the humidity.  Two, my camera was hazy, thanks to the heat and humidity.  The camera had been in the cool house (ahhh - geothermal cooling!), and when it hit the outside air, it fogged right up.  Grrrr.

I'd already given up the peas as a lost cause this year, and although I'm now harvesting beans, so far it is a minuscule harvest.  I checked the beans at my plot at work yesterday, and not a single plant was to be seen!  Something either ate them (I've heard rumors of a rogue woodchuck), or the heat and drought did them in.  All that remains of my community garden plot are the trellises I made and the sunflowers.

Meanwhile, some of the community gardeners have brought us tomato hornworms for the office.  These are caterpillars of the five-spotted hawk moth, and they wreak havoc on tomato plants.  I'd never seen one before, so I marveled at their size and beautiful markings...until I found them on MY tomato plants at home!  Fortunately, two of the three I found looked like this:

Those white "things" on the caterpillar's back are cocoons of the pupating larvae of braconid wasp.  Hooray!  These parasitic wasps are hate gardener's friend.  The wasp comes buzzing along and lays her eggs on/in the caterpillar.  The wasp larvae hatch and begin to digest the inside of their host.  When they get ready to pupate, the unfortunate caterpillar is beyond redemption.  It will soon perish while the young wasps reach adulthood safe inside their white cocoons.  When pupation is complete, the new wasps emerge and the cycle continues.  If you find a hornworm that is covered with pupal cases, leave it on your tomatoes, for it will die, but the wasps will hatch and spread through your garden, looking for more hornworms to parasitize.  They are the gardener's friend.

I also found this strangely shaped "grasshopper" in the garden:

Here is a close-up of the head:

This, my friends, is one of the coneheaded katydids (the only other time I've seen a conehead was in the Amazon rainforest).  How bizarre is it!?!  This one is a female, as one can tell by noting the long ovipositor she is sporting (see the first photo).  Based on the range maps in my new grasshopper ID book, I'm thinking this is either a robust conehead, or a sword-bearing conehead.  Robust coneheads are the largest of the coneheads, and the female's ovipositor is 1-1.1 times the length of the hind femur.  Hm...this might just be a robust - that ovipositor is pretty darn long.