A Caterpillar Ate My Homework

So I co-own this green-ag company. The product is a device that produces frost on demand--think of it as frost in a bottle that can be used instead of conventional herbicides.  I need to document how well this works, so Hubby kindly let me borrow his smanshy camera, hooked to his smanshy computer, complete with time-lapse photography controls. I think he overestimates my photographic abilities, but we shall see.

The most economically important weed is large crabgrass, so that's what we plan to use in our demos. Because we are scientists, we must do this in a controlled enviroment. So our consultant orders crabgrass seed (yes!) for several $100 per pound and grows plants up in a greenhouse. When we initiated our most recent trial, I ordered 3 extra pots of crabgrass for my photography exploits. Hubby kindly picked them up for me when he was in Durham, near the greenhouse in Raleigh.

I carefully watered the plants for a week, and panicked the night I left the plants outside and it reached 34F here. The plants were moved to the garage. And then one of the plants started disappearing before my eyes.  I found a fat, happy sub-centimeter caterpillar in that container. Now I get only two shots at my time-lapse photography of a wilting oh-so-coddled crabgrass plant. Such is the life of the entrepreneur!