Yep. I am a crazy woman. I literally spent the summer fretting over my garden. I poured all of my COVID fear, angst and anxiety into my tomatoes and carrots, watching over them relentlessly. Once we discovered a hornworm on one of the tomato plants, my anxiety flipped into high gear. I usually cycle all summer with a view to a 50 km fundraising cycle in the fall, which I still plan to do. In the evenings, I spent more hours hunting down hornworms, scouring every plant, every leaf and every stem than I did much of anything else. Probable a bit of obsessive compulsive disorder pouring out over my garden. I have never experienced this kind of emotional response to my garden and I have been gardening for 25 years.
But with the brilliant hornworm advice from this Facebook page, we won the hornworm battle. We triumphed. It took so many hours, so much persistence and sacrifice to win this war but the results are well worth it. My goal every year is to can about 200 jars of the best pasta sauce on the planet ( yes that was a direct challenge to all you pasta sauce canners).
We left the garden in the hands of my daughter and her partner while we took some time away. God love them for coming to my place at night with a blacklight in search of hornworms. She is a passionate gardener too. I raced to my tomato patch when I got home and gasped when I saw all the tomatoes. Buckets of tomatoes. Hundreds of tomatoes. There were six plants that struggled the most with hornworm damage and I was astounded to see how they had bounced back with bountiful tomatoes on each one.
Yeah, you know where I am going with this. Hornworms and tomatoes are true to life. An adversity hits and you have a couple of options: give up, walk away, except defeat OR, stand up no matter how terrified you are, come up with a plan, work as a team, persist, fight, persist again, find your resilience and bounce back and the result is success and a bountiful harvest ......that comes with a price. I did lose some plants.
We are living under the chronic stress of COVID 19. We are being asked to continue the fight despite how painful and stressful it is. We are now a generation that is experiencing a global disaster and we are winning but we must persist as a team; as a smart, collaborative team. And when this is over, and it will be over, we can assess what we've lost and take an account of what we have gained as we learned to pivot and adapt to a pandemic.
Here is some good news as we head into the fall:
Ontario's reopening was relatively successful. We have not experienced a second surge, yet. Why? Due to a range of factors, including local mask bylaws, physical distancing,and summer weather that allowed people to spend time outdoors, where the risk of transmission is at its lowest.
Experts also credit the bulk of the population's general adherence to public health advice. THIS WAS KEY!
The international benchmark is to keep the infection rate below 5 %. In August, Ontario was far below that, with just .4 per cent of the nearly 700,000 tests conducted.
In the next few posts I will talk about why it is so important that we all get a flushot this year and why it will be so important to continue to adhere to those public health guidelines as we move indoors. The war is not over yet. The fall and winter will be tough on many folks who have relied on outdoor socializing to keep their mood up.
But right now, it is critical that we insist on a safe return to school. The province has left the return to school safety plan in the hands of individual boards and some boards are doing a better than others. Some kids will be safe, others will not. Parents have been given a choice to send their kids back to school or keep them home and for most parents in this province, there is NO CHOICE. COVID 19 has exposed the inequities in our society. Those that suffer the most are those that are marginalized and disabled, those that live with food and job insecurity and those with fragile households where abuse and neglect reside.
Please consider sending an email to your local MPP insisting on a safe return to school for every student across the province. I have just joined a group of remarkable people called Ontario Safe.
Their mission: create awareness and advocate for safe and equitable conditions in Ontario schools, with a focus on attaining smaller class sizes and safety protocols based on scientific evidence and the advice of public health experts.
By clicking on this link, an email will be automatically sent to your MPP. We need to flood the inboxes of our government officials before the kids return to school.
https://ontariosafe.com/contact-your-representatives/
Thanks for your hornworm help and your help with protecting the health and wellbeing of our children, their teachers and their families.
Anne-Marie
Please share.
The above link is in full compliance with CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation), PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act). By using the link, you will need to give your name and postal code so that the tool knows who your MPP is. Your personal information will not be shared.
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