tomato leaves eaten....

Probably tomatoe hornworm... They can be VERY rapidly destructive!

Find the critter, kill it, then most of the leaves should grow back.

You can spray the plant with liquid sevin. It biodegrades.

K.

Please read up on Sevin before you use it. It does biodegrade, but it's more complicated than that:

Look, I know that pesticides are bad and work hard to develop my biocontrol. Lizards, snakes, toads, spiders, assasin bugs and ladybird beetles are all welcome in my garden and there are plenty of them.

But when it comes to rapid destruction by critters such as hornworms, there is a time and a place for pesticides and sevin is the most benign of them!

I try to hand pick them, but the little bastards are hard to spot!!!

And they do oh so much damage oh so quickly. :-(

Pans of beer work for slugs and snails. Dark Ale seems to attract far more of them than cheap beer but that does not atttract hornworms. ;-)

I try, I really do, to stay as organic as possible, but sometimes it's just not practical!

K.

As mentioned, the dreaded tomato hornworm. They won't kill the plant if found soon but they sure make it look ugly fast. Look in the area of the damage and it'll be closeby, usually hanging upside down under a leaf or along a stem. Cut off the leaf below where the critter is and dump them both, or pick them off with needle nose pliers. Only problem there is they usually have a good grip on the stem, so best to cut it. I've done this for years and not lost a plant yet.

Now for the real questi> Hello All,

I thought malathion was less dangerous than Sevin? Seems to me I remember reading it wasn't harmful to anything with a functioning liver, as the liver converted it to something harmless.

But Sevin is the best spray for cornsilks :-).

I think they're the larva of a large moth sometimes called a "false hummer". If you've ever seen one hover over a blossom, you'll know why.

Alternatively, you could get a couple of ducks. They LOVE tomato hornworms and will fight each other over hornworms. Other birds will sometimes eat the small hornworms, but often turn up their noses(beaks?) at large ones, but ducks will practically kill each other for hornworms, no matter how big the hornworms get.

Malathion kills birds. Sevin does not...

I lost some baby ducklings because my neighbor used Malathion for fire ants and it washed into my yard during a rain. :-(

K.

Have you tried Bt for the hornworms?

I wasn't trying to be judgmental, and I'm glad you didn't take it that way. We all have to make decisions about what level of pesticide use we are comfortable with....I was just hoping to encourage people would educate themselves before automatically reaching for the spray. It sounds like you are working to create a balanced ecosystem and I applaud you for it.

Personally, I use dormant oil, "Sluggo" for slugs, Bt for serious caterpillar infestations (such as fall webworms), insecticidal soap, and that's it. I handpick some pests, and learn to live with others. I encourage beneficial predators as much as possible, and try to follow good cultural practices to avoid the need for fungicides. I don't grow things, such as roses, that need continual fussing over.

Aside from the real and potential harmful effects of pesticides/herbicides, I just hate suiting up to use them....and I'm willing to bet that many homeowners and gardeners skip the warnings about goggles, protective clothing and respirators.

Cheers, Sue

il Mon, 10 May 2004 09:20:03 -0500, Katra ha scritto:

Would putting a cut open container around the plants reduce the chewing? We have no such thing as that hornworm but I do find a little plastic barrier slows some creatures down. Especially the darn birds that like to break the stems. One can then use bait that's out of reach of animals too.

il Mon, 10 May 2004 16:10:42 GMT, don' snipped-for-privacy@there.com (The Watcher) ha scritto:

Now there's a opportunity for someone. Hiring out gardening ducks for a day and night. :-)

Hi Again all,

Hornworms eh.....

All the leaves were taken from the stem on every plant except 4 now. Also today 2 Pepper plants were stripped. Do they eat those as well? I'll have to check for the buggers tommorrow morning when there is some light. I guess I'll try the sevin....

Thanks

Craig

Hi SugarChile,

My family has a rose that came from my grandmother, and never give flower after my grandmother pass aways. My father put a lot of effort on it to just keep it alive, a lot of spry and fertiliser still end up an unhelthy plant.

After my father pass away, one day I found that it's dead from the root up, just the top of the plant still remain green. I lay the green part to the ground, and manage to make it come out shoot and root.

In my hand, I never give it any fertiliser, and never spray, I even don't care when something eating the leave. The only thing I do are replace the soil yearly when the soil are lacking organic matter, and remove the old branches to force it come out some new one. It now giving flower and sometime will four or five flower at the sametime.

I do believe as long as we keep the soil good, and constantly remove old plant/brances, it will stay helthy for most of the time. This included those plant that people believe hard to maintain.

Regards, Wong

-- Latitude: 06.10N Longitude: 102.17E Altitude: 5m

Hello Wong, I have been enjoying your posts and your contributions.

I agree with you that working to keep the soil healthy will lead to healthy plants. I have clay soil, which is high in nutrients, but needs a lot of organic material added. I have been working on my soil for almost twenty years, and in places it is now black and rich. Most of my plants do well with only the periodic addition of compost and mulch.

We have very high humidity here for extended periods in the summer, and many rose varieties, even the resistant ones, fall prey to blackspot. We also have a lot of Japanese beetles, which seem to favor roses above all else. There are so many beautiful and wonderful things I can grow without intensive care, that I decided to forgo roses and enjoy the ones my neighbors grow.

Your grandmother's rose sounds wonderful, and I'm glad you were able to help it thrive,

Cheers, Sue

Speaking of lizards, couple days ago I saw a type I'd not seen before (SoCal desert) -- it was blue, looked like an iguana (big thick head and body, not a skinny "snake with legs" like most of our little desert lizards) and kinda spiny all over.

Pyrethrins work just as well, break down very fast, and are harmless to warmblooded creatures even if ingested. And try insecticidal soap (essentially a mix of dish soap to choke bugs, and canola oil to make it stick to stuff). Hornworms curl up and die right before your eyes. Only had to spray the tomatos 2x last year, and they responded to the soap by growing into 12 foot long vines with LOTS of fruit.

Try listening for them. When they're disturbed, they make this odd mechanical noise. Then you can hone in on the sound and get 'em.

Not much less than a maniac with an axe :(

~REZ~

To listen to the rose nu^H^H enthusiasts, you'd think they were all that way, but plenty of glorious roses do just fine in an atmosphere of malign neglect. We have some that get minimal care (trim off obviously dead/broken stuff, but not pruned beyond that, douse with insecticidal soap as needed and a systemic once a year, and lots of water) and they bloom like crazy. One is presently making clumps of blooms the size of dinner plates.

If it requires all that, it's too much work, and I look for something else to use :)

~REZ~

Perhaps it was in mourning for your grandmother.

Excellent! I really like the idea of a plant that comes down through a family for multiple generations. A rose is much nicer than our family plant (an apparently immortal philodendron that goes back at least to the early 1960s).

For many plants, especially trees (and roses really are a sort of small tree) that's true. Sometimes we fuss over them TOO much and perhaps get things out of balance, when leaving well enough alone would be better.

~REZ~

I'm even putting predators inside my new greenhouse. ;-) Anyone squishes a spider in my yard gets yelled at!!!

Gourd birdhouses encourage house wrens and they pretty much clean up the yard of bugs when they have babies, but unfortunately, they also eat spiders. Most of my spiders are nocturnal so they still do ok.

Tell me more about Bt for hornworms??? I'm really not well educated on that product.

Try the beer. Besides, it's somewhat satisfying to see a pan of drowned slugs.

I also gave up on roses except for climbing blazes. Those do ok with no fuss. I just had too many roses die.

Soap spray is great, but my ladybird beetle population is high enough now to pretty much take care of apids, mealy bugs and scale. You should have seen the larvae in the asparagus bed last year! There were ladybird pupae all over the ferns. It was neat. :-)

I've taken care of my dill pests (swallowtail butterfly larvae) by planting extra parsley and fennel to place them on. They can eat all of that that they want.

Thanks! Kat

Hornworm moths lay their eggs on the leaves. :-( They don't eat the stems.

I try to hand pick the little buggers when possible, not the least because it's so much fun to watch the ducks fight over them when I toss them in with the poultry! Especially the larger ones.

For birds, try some pinwheels, and those are decorative! Owl decoys are also good and Wal-Mart has a nice supply of them right now. Just move them weekly and make sure they cast a shadow.

K.