Stepped out to admire my garden a few minutes ago and just about freaked . A large green caterpillar type bug has almost completely denuded one of my cayenne plants of it's leaves . Ate into several of the peppers too . The interweb has helped me identify this thing as a tomato hornworm , and I'm about to read up on how to deal with this pest . BTW , that one is now a puddle of goo and a bit of green skin now .
Yep, the infamous Tomato Horn Worm. If your garden is small it is possible to just look at the plants early in the morning. When I see them I take a pair of scissors and remove them from the plant and smash them with the heal of my boot. Sometimes I just snip them in half, the green goo squirts out :) I find that there are not many of them and I tend to get them before any major damage. They are not far from the chewed limbs. Check every morning. I snip off the chewed limb so it is easier to find the pest the next morning. Look for the chewed limbs and find the bug. In three days I smashed nine of the insects.
In a few more days you will begin to appreciate a bug called the "Wasp". When you start seeing the poor green bug covered by white wasp eggs that will hatch and slowly the wasp larvae will consume the Tomato Horn Worm while it is still alive. Oh the horrors!
Welcome to gardening :)
Nad R wrote: ...
yes, leave those ones alone so the wasps can do their thing. they may do more damage before the wasps finish them off, but it's a small sacrifice to make to keep the life cycle of the wasp going. i've yet to see any worms with wasps, but when i do i will be glad to let them be.
haha,
last year was not bad for tomato hornworms, the year before we had about 25, this season we have not had any so far, but will start looking. usually we haven't seen them until the first few weeks of August, but with you two writing about them i'll have to go out and take a closer look tomorrow morning to be sure. i looked them over pretty good (for poo sign) yesterday and didn't see any chewed leaves or poo nuggets on the ground (another easy way to find them also if you have bare earth under the plants instead of mulch) but a second look is worth it.
songbird
Those small Horn Worms can produce rather large Poo Nuggets, but look at how much one bug can eat :)
I've only seen one tomato hornworm in about 10 years--- And it was covered with wasp eggs! He/she managed to eat about 1/2 of a branch of tomato before being consumed [from the inside] by the little wasps. The dried out carcass remained on the end of that branch for weeks. Made me smile every time I walked by.
Jim
I use a vegetable garden insecticide. Tomato horn worms can decimate a plant fast and while they are big and easy to pick off, they are difficult to see since they blend in with the plant so well.
I plucked two more this morning . This time from a couple of tomato plants . I have cantalopes running under the tomatoes , the poo piles on the leaves led me right to the little horned buggers . I'm puzzled , why have I never had a problem with these before ? This is only the second year for 'maters in this location , and I didn't have any last year . And I've never seen a moth that fits the description given in the several articles I've read . -- Snag Learning keeps you young !
Tomatoes where I found two worms a couple of weeks ago are growing in pots on my deck 10 feet above ground. I've got a plant below the deck, at ground level, that was untouched. Can't recall any problems last year and don't know what moth looks like, but they must be around.
seen them flitting about.
Yup , they're big moths . And that's what puzzles me , because I've never seen one that size . We're bird watchers (well , kinda) and I'm pretty sure that a moth the size of a hummingbird would attract our attention .
Yep, that's them, I seen one two days ago. They can easily be mistaken for a hummingbird while in flight.
Last year I caught this swallowtail caterpillar devouring my dill. Note carefully the tiny critter afflicting my destroyer. You can see it about half way down the "spine".
Boron
We found one munching on one of our parsley plants a couple of years ago and moved it to another less important plan in the garden.
But when I looked it up and read that the parsley was the only plant we had that it would eat, we found it and put it back.
There was only one caterpillar and we had a lot of parsley.
-snip-
That's the one critter I share with. both the caterpillar and the butterfly are too beautiful to resent. Parsley, dill, carrots. . .. I might move him to a Queen Anne's lace if it looks like I have more caterpillars than 'browse'.
That's what I've seen. Plants are on deck near kitchen table and I often see things that look like hummingbirds but not quite. Always nice to learn something new. Part of the fun of gardening.
We grow rue (ruta graveolens) for the swallowtails. It's a tough plant, self sows readily, perennial in zone 5 and really does draw the swallowtails. It's also reputed to give the swallowtails a bad taste.
The drawback is having to avoid skin contact with rue you because you can get burns from it.
Update , after following one of the links posted here , I have found out the ones in my garden are actually tobacco hornworms . The giveaway is the diagonal stripes rather than V shaped on their sides . I'll be checkin' on thses morning and evening for a while ... since that same article said they prefer to feed at dawn/dusk .
Mine are also tobacco hornworms. But for names sake there does not seem to be that much different. Even thou I called them Tomato Horn worms. So let the flame wars begin :)
We have both hummingbirds and hummingbird moths that visit our Monarda. My husband named the moths "humbugs." There are several varieties of Hummingbird moth and the one that appears here is not the adult hornworm.
Snag wrote: ...
they can fly some distance to lay eggs, so it really doesn't matter if you had them before or not. we are a fair distance from any neighbors who garden so there is no reason to expect them here, but they do arrive...
last year we had a few, the year before we had over twenty, this year we've seen none so far (checked again this morning).
if you turn the soil under an established tomato patch and have missed some of the worms you will see large brown/red/purplish pupa in the soil. very impressive critters.
crop rotation will help some, but is not likely to ever keep them away completely.
hand picking them off is an easy non- chemical means of control, and if you don't like cutting them in half or squishing them they will probably drown in slightly soapy water. then you can compost them or bury them or throw them away.
songbird
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