Several of us went to the country together one summer and grew tomato worms.
We were astounded, for we had not planned anything this ambitious at the start of our botanical work. None of us had much talent in the natural sciences, and if you had told us at the outset that we would discover the secret of growing tomato worms, it would have seemed as absurd as suggesting that we might discover a new planet.
Our project was quite modest. It called only for growing tomatoes. We bought six small plants from a farmer, placed them in the earth after the last frost date, placed a ridiculously large stake beside each plant, watered them occasionally and forgot about them.
After several weeks we noticed that the small plants had developed into a miniature dense green jungle of decidedly sinister appearance. We had not expected those small plants to burgeon so menacingly. They were at least five feet tall, extremely thick and shadowy and somehow seemed to defy human beings to come near them.
From time to time one heard the death struggles of birds and cats issuing from deep inside the foliage. As the summer sun burned down on this dark growth, however, delicate yellow blossoms developed small, green, wartlike excrescences which gradually became recognizable as developing tomatoes.
We assumed that the experiment was succeeding.
One sunny morning we awoke to an eerie spectacle. Overnight, the upper portion of what had been a leafy green jungle just the day before had been reduced to a stripped waste of leafless stalks. It was reminiscent of those photographs of old Civil War battlefields in which whole forests have been blasted to splinters by gunfire.
This was, of course, the work of the tomato worm. Close inspection turned up a large crop of tomato worms. Some of us were angry until we saw the significance of what we had accomplished.
We had started with a bare patch of earth, and from it had created a fine, voracious crop of living organisms. Everyone could grow tomatoes, and did. How many people could grow tomato worms?
We are still uncertain how we did it, but we believe the secret is to start with tomato plants. Last year we had day lilies in that location and did not create a single tomato worm. Before that we had petunias and did not grow any tomato worms that year either.
If my theory is correct—that tomato worms cannot be grown without first growing tomatoes—the consequences for agriculture could be ponderous. Next year we could grow corn there and not have to worry about its being destroyed by tomato worms. By declining to grow tomatoes the American farmer would no longer have to dread the possibility of his crop being devastated by tomato worms.
This raises the question where the tomato worm lives when there are no tomatoes in its neighborhood. Does it lie in the earth for centuries waiting to be summoned to life in the sun the moment some passing gardener puts a tomato root into its bed?
Or do the tomato worms all congregate in some central location, like a union hiring hall, until they hear of tomatoes in the next county, and then crawl off to work? My own suspicion is that they spring from tomato seeds and grow right along with the tomatoes. Whatever the case, tomato worms apparently do not exist in active form until you put in tomatoes.
These days when all decent people want to live in brotherhood, or even wormhood, with nature, one feels compelled to find a purposeful role for his tomato worms.
We have tried turning ours loose on the crabgrass, but the tomato worms refuse to eat it. They lie there and sulk like spoiled children who refuse to eat their spinach. We tried placing a few on the dog to see if they would attack his fleas, but they seemed offended and rapidly dropped off and headed back toward the ruin of the tomato patch.
We want to live in harmony with nature, of course, and we are worried about what to do to make them happy once the last of the tomatoes has been eaten.
Great advances in knowledge almost always create problems like this. The invention of the car led rapidly to the traffic jam and the energy crisis. The discovery of how to grow tomato worms leads to bouts of despair about being hostile to nature because you cannot think of ways to keep the worms usefully employed.
Still, man is not stopped in his ceaseless forward progress. Next summer we will plant potatoes where the worms now thrive and with luck, we may discover how to grow potato bugs.