Maine counts even if main thing is cutworms

Tell stories, it's how we remember things!

We've had editors delete words from an article as "extraneous detail" and although we pleaded the case it was a lost cause if the editor wasn't also a gardener.

Gardeners know that this field is all about minutiae, and that colorful, visual garden tales keep the most valuable of those in easily recalled bits.

For instance, if someone tells us that their dog eats cutworms, we're going to remember that! If the teller said the dog was doing this in Maine in the town of Auburn in late November, if we ever need to know how late in the season we -- or anyone up through New England zone 5 -- might expect to be able to make a dent in the cutworm population, well, we have a pretty memorable handle on that fact, don't we?