Is my Tomato Doing Yayo?

It all started so innocently with my SUNGOLD yellow cherry tomato. The subtle insistence that we move the tomato patch to Miami. The way it ended all it's sentences with "mang". Quoting dialogue from Scarface : “All I have in this world is my balls and my life....” and "fuck the Diaz brothers". Talking about moving keys of fertilizer. I thought it was kind of cute at first...but then...a moment of clarity...was my tomato doing yayo?

I don't how it began. It could have been the time we watched Scarface on the laptop outside to beat the heat. Maybe it was the guilt of replacing the fallen ISIS CHERRY and GREEN GRAPE tomatoes that perished due to ground termites. I'm not sure. Maybe I wasn't there after work to water it like I should have.

Or is than...can that be....DIATOMACEOUS EARTH?!! Of course it is, oh, thank God! I'm just kidding about the yayo. Sheesh! I'm just being escandaloso en el jardin. Actually I was the one who tried to deter and eradicate the ground termites, which apparently can be a bit of a crop pest, and accidentally spilled the bag of diatomaceous earth all over the place. Diatomaceous earth is a completely legal white non-toxic powder that is the fossilized remains of ancient sea organisms called diatoms. It's often used in livestock feed and to control crop pests. It it completely harmless to mammals, though it may cause some irritation to the skin if handled inproperly. The fine powder works mechanically, not chemically, on hard and soft shelled insects and bugs by (this is gory, not very Buddhist) such as beetles, fleas, ants, earwigs, silverfish, cockroaches, slugs, and others by scratching their outer surfaces and causing them to basically dehydrate to death. And now that I've just written that, I feel really sad and will probably never use it again.

Anyway, I sprinkled it around the soil to try and get rid of the ground termites that ate my tomatoes and dropped a bunch and that's why there is a big pile of powder near my tomato. Don't get all crazy. The drug wars are not on in Highland Park.

And as a wise woman has said "Everything just wants to live..."

PS- This was part of my Sunday project carried out in the humid heat wave we are having in LA- I need to replace those fallen tomato plants. My Sunday excursion took me to Sunset Nursery (I can't believe I ventured into the world in the heat!), where I picked up a couple of SWEET BASIL, CINNAMON BASIL, and some SPICY GLOBE BASIL, then Trader Joe's where I picked up another huge, but rootbound SWEET BASIL. Last weekend I also went to Burkhard's and picked up a couple of new cherry tomatoes- SUNGOLD yellow cherry and SWEET 100 both admittedly hybrids, but there was nothing else that looked good. I wanted to plant cherries in that area because it doesn't get tons and tons of sun, and I needed something that would ripen easily. Larger tomatoes obviously take more time and sun to ripen. When you are at Trader Joe's buying tomatoes, take a look at some of the containers- some of them are the SWEET 100 variety.