And the garden runs green-blue with caterpillar blood.

I'm serious.  Caterpillars bleed greenish-blueish.  At least mine do.

It was an inevitability.  I have listened to my friends whine and dry heave talking about the huge tomato worms they've been picking off their plants.  Big, thick juicy caterpillars.  Up until recently, I've dodged that bullet.  But now, the caterpillars have arrived.  And are pooping up a storm in my garden.  

I've been finding a lot of strange droppings in my garden lately.  I even thought I had mice now instead of just rats.  And then I found this sucker:

Nasty!!!  It was huge!!!  I use the past tense because I disposed of the creature about 30 seconds after I took this picture.  My method of choice is to split the caterpillar in half using my pruning shears.  Melodramatic?  Probably.  Effective?  Definitely.  I took another picture after this one after I'd cleaved it in two and had left the lower half still clinging to the plant and a huge slime/mucus drip hanging from it, similar to what you see hanging from the chins of teething children.  It was awesome.

So now that it's officially summer vacation for me for the next 4 weeks, I have a new hobby.  Caterpillar hunting.  The Tall One asked me today what I was going to accomplish with my day.  I told him killing caterpillars.  He wasn't stoked.  But I'm quite good at it.  The first day, I killed 3.  Yesterday and today I've killed 4!  And today it was 3 big fat ones and 1 medium one that just needed a couple of more days to get to big-juicy status.   In fact, I might even keep a running total on this site, a body count of sorts.  Remember, I'm not ruthless and cold-hearted, there's lots of other plants in this city for the bugs to eat that aren't in my garden.  I just don't think that creatures without souls or intelligence beyond eat-grow-cocoon-morph-fly-mate-die will grasp the concept of "stay out of my garden if you wish to complete the circle of life."

And that's what I'm here for.