First Tomato Hornworm of the season

[hendi_alex]

When the moths are laying eggs, you better believe that they are laying as frequently and in as many places as they can. An unattended vine can be decimated in just a few days.

Control of tomato hornworms.

1) Look for limbs stripped of leaves.

[img]https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3302/3608682234_4c7489dc2e.jpg[/img]

2) Hunt carefully until you find one or more worms.

The worms camaflage well, so use a sharp eye and hunt carefully.
[img]https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3382/3608650938_058e9e5175.jpg[/img]

Here is a second worm found on another plant about 100 feet away. When the worms are not feeding, they stay perfectly still and you can look directly at them and never see the critter.
[img]https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3608657860_d49085b09a.jpg[/img]

3) Remove worm.
This one is so large, it must have crawled to my plant from somewhere else. Just not enough damage to get him this large.
[img]https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3608/3607836521_ed1974abf8.jpg[/img]

4) Squish worm on any handy surface. Caution: don't aim foot toward others in the garden!
[img]https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2480/3607837759_44e7d95f27.jpg[/img]

[hendi_alex]

As bad as hornworms are, tomato borers are worse. Usually by the time you notice the damage, often by a tomato turning orange before it should be, not only will one tomato be ruined but rather one or two entire clusters will be ruined. The borers will bore into one tomato, then will eat its way back out and into an adjacent tomato, generally destroying every tomato in that particular cluster. Trimming excess foilage from plants helps with seeing this pest at work. Also, when you walk your garden, carefully inspect your clusters of fruit, looking for bore holes, droppings, or discoloration.

The tomato fruitworm (borer) and the corn ear worm are one and the same. So it is not a great idea to plant your tomatoes overly close to your corn.

[Duh_Vinci]

Nice find Sir! And thank you for the tips and info, very helpful indeed!

Regards,
D

[GardenerGirl]

If you are like me and the idea of squishing a 4-inch bug is waaay too squicky for you, you can also kill them by dropping them into soapy water. Less spurty mess.

[hendi_alex]

I like the idea of the dead critters on the ground right beside the plants. With bean beetles often leave the dead ones on the leaves. It is kind of like heads placed at the top of poles, a stern warning!

[GardenerGirl]

Never underestimate the power of psychological warfare in pest control, I guess!

[applestar]

Didn't I read somewhere that dead bug spray -- pulse/blend in blender with water, strain and spray -- makes good bug repellent? Does that apply to all bugs I wonder?

We had one tomato hornworm on our tomatoes last year. It didn't eat that much, a leaf here, a bite or two out of couple of green tomatoes there. My kids watched it with fascination and made a game of trying to find it every day. It disappeared one day, still not quite big enough to pupate. Kids were disappointed. I think this year, I'll raise one indoors so we can see what it turns into. I can be generous -- last year I had 6 tomato plants; this year, I have 20+.

[hendi_alex]

If you ever get four or five tomato worms on one vine, it will be totally denuded within a few days to a week. I'm with you on sharing, and don't mind sharing with any of the critters in the yard, pest or not. I am especially fond of the tomato hornworm and as a child raised them from caterpillar through moth. The moth is fairly large and grey, and its flight looks almost like that of a bat. An interesting creature, but each year my vines will get plagued with them unless some intervention is made. So this species will have to make its living somewhere other than in my garden.

I think that birds may be our friend wrt the tomato hornworm. I'll see areas of leaf loss on a plant from one day to the next, but the caterpillar has mysteriously vanished before it can be located.

[elevenplants]

@ Applestar: We did that last year, and it turned into a hummingbird moth! Beautiful. Too bad they love tomatoes as much as we do when they are caterpillars! Kids enjoyed it, though. And hey, we have about the same number of tomato plants this year....20+!

Rebecca

[Rob]

Huh.

I've made it a bit of a game for my family and I to go out with a set of scissors and behead the hornworms whenever we find them.

[Haesuse]

I've had a few borer/fruitworms on my cherry tomato plants. noticed a pile of droppings on one tomato, and sure enough, directly above, a cluster had been utterly sucked dry. one hole in each.

camped out the next night in my garden and hunted the little buggers. caught 3 of them.