The Very Hungry...Hornworm?
Subtitle: What's Eating Susan's Tomatoes
If you grow tomatoes, chances are you've had to deal with these pesky creatures. The tomato or tobacco hornworm starts life as tiny larva, but very quickly it can grow to 4 inches long and as thick as your index finger as it munches through your garden. One hornworm can defoliate an entire tomato plant if it isn't stopped in time. The one you see here ate the top third of a 6-foot tall tomato plant overnight. That happened despite the fact that I check carefully 2 or 3 times a day; they cling to the undersides of leaves and their coloring makes them very hard to spot. You have to carefully track them by following the trail of eaten leaves and excrement that they leave behind.
Here's a close up of this fellow continuing in his quest to eat my entire garden. They will eat right through the green tomatoes, too.
I bring this up because I have a question for all the vegan gardeners out there: What do you do about garden pests such as the hornworm?
Do you...
A. Pick them off and kill them?
B. Spray the plants with an organic pesticide like Bt, which ultimately kills them?
C. Drive them across town and release them in a vacant lot?
D. Put them in a tank, hand feed them tomato leaves until they grow to an enormous size and then release them across town in a vacant lot?
I have to admit to doing all of the above at one time or another. The only other option that I can think of would be to E. Allow them to eat all the tomato plants, which given the time and resources I've put into my garden, I just can't do. So, what do others of you, who feel compassion for all living creatures, do when faced with a creature that just wants to eat your garden?
By the way, the creature above, whom E. named "Mr. Tingle" for some reason, was released in the empty field opposite our community swimming pool. That made E. very happy...and also, I suspect, some passing bird a very nice meal.
Here's Domino defending the garden from hornworms!
Coming tomorrow: What to cook for the Fourth of July.
posted by SusanV at 3:52 PM
33 Comments:
I had to deal with one of those suckers last week. Because of the cold weather this spring, my garden got started late. Things are just now starting to flower and bud. I noticed my first tomato two weeks ago. When I went to check its progress last week, it was half eaten. Next to it was a fat, green worm.
I picked him up and took him across my (very large) yard and let him go.
I've never heard of a horn worm, but my garden is eaten alive by snails when I'm not vigilant (not one California poppy survived). I collect the snails in a bucket and release them a block away.
Ugh--it's kind of cute but kind of... not. I've not had the chance to have a garden yet, but what I *think* I would do is take the little guy across town and leave him somewhere.
By the way, I already know what I'm cooking for the 4th of July--your seitan ribz! I haven't had a chance to try them yet but this should be an ideal opportunity!
I had trouble with them too. I removed them and put some of them across the street into the park, but kept one in a large jar, fed it tomato leaves, and watched it turn into a beautiful moth. :-)
I have to say that Mr. Tingle is an exceptionally beautiful creature! What a picture, Susan!
What a drag. I've never seen worms like this in my own garden. Maybe they live where there's more humidity.
Well, we have not had any of Mr. Tingles relatives yet, but when our youngest daughter was about 9 or 10 she caught Mr. Tingles Great, great, great grandfather and kept him. She would lie in bed with him and then put him in his jar and sleep with him. We watched him make his way to becoming a very large moth and let him go. Memories... :o)
That's so cute! I'm pretty sure we don't get hornworms in Australia (and as the rain pours and the wind howls today, summer gardening seems a distant memory!) but on our garden we sprayed garlic spray (just blended organic garlic with water) on all our veggies and frutis and that kept the crawlies away!
Fortunately here in italy we don't see them very often...but actually I once saw a very big yellow hornworm in the garden..but not near my tomatoes! This summer we have snails all over the garden...little snails who come out at night...they eat everything :( my peas, my basilico... :(
I never knew what these things were called before, but I've seen them. We just relocate them to areas away from the tomato plants.
How do these things find the tomato plants? Where do they come from???
Susan,
First off I'd like to thank you for your blog -- I'm a longtime fan, so it's kind of sad that it took your troubles with hornworms in order for me to finally post a comment, but given my history with these things, I just had to write!
My veganism extends from my compassion for all living things, to the point where I relocate earthworms when I am digging through my garden so that I don't end up splitting them with my spade/shovel. So, you can imagine the dilemma I faced when my garden was getting absolutely DESTROYED by hornworms! In the blink of an eye, they stripped nearly half the plants in my garden, and there were too many of them for me to manually relocate them. While I was soul-searching to find a solution, a group of parasitic wasps planted their eggs on the backs of the hornworms. It was at that point that I made a decision -- I decided that I wasn't going to let the welfare of the hornworms overtake the welfare of my family -- I would have felt horrible to see our garden succumb to these things as well as have family members get stung by wasps! I reasoned that at least Bt is a naturally occurring bacteria, so that's what I used against them.
It worked instantly, and saved the garden, but with the side-effect that I felt horrible watching those things die! If I had to do it over again, I'm not sure if I would take the same path, so I actually spared myself of having to make such a decision this year and didn't plant tomatoes! Even though they are attracted to other plants as well, so far I have not seen them this year.
Anyhow, sorry for the LONG post...please update us and let us know what you decide to do! Thanks again for your blog...
Katie, I hope it stops for you at one!
Chanale, I haven't had much trouble with snails (knock on wood).
Laura, I really hope you like the ribz!
Brooke, I had one once that got HUGE, but I released it before it became a moth. I was just afraid that it wouldn't change in captivity. Glad to hear they will.
Nupur, I find them pretty, too, especially the "horn" and the false eyes (all camouflage to protect them from birds, I believe).
Kalyn, you are so lucky! Everywhere I've raised tomatoes I've had to battle them--there's never just one but dozens of them.
Veg-a-Nut, I have a feeling we'll be raising a moth of our own soon.
Freedom, I'll have to give your spray a try.
Magie, the only cure I know for snails is beer (they drink it, not you) but unfortunately, that's not a humane way to solve the problem.
Zookeeper, the moths lay eggs on or around the tomato plants and these larvae hatch and start eating right away. Later they go into the ground to pupate and emerge as moths...which starts the cycle again.
Vineet, I have to admit that I used Bt on my plants and it seems to have worked, though I didn't think so at first. It's been a few days since I've seen any hornworms. Mr. Tingle was the last. All together, I probably picked about 25 worms off the tomatoes this year, so I may have gotten them all before spraying the Bt. I have a LOT of tomatoes, and they're just now ripening, so I didn't want to risk waking up in the morning to find they'd all been eaten. Next year I may cover the plants with nets to try to prevent the infestation from happening at all.
By the way, those parasitic wasps are one of the natural ways of controlling hornworms. If you leave them alone, the wasps will kill the worms. I've never seen them, but I didn't think that they're the kind of wasps that will sting people.
I had some of those on my Datura plant, which was already struggling to keep leaves on it. When I read online that they would eat tomatoes, I moved them over to my tomato plants because, well, I can always get tomatoes at the store and I wanted to see them turn into moths. Next time I should put them in jars, I guess, because they ate their fill and then bailed before they ever cocooned! On the bright side, both Datura and tomato plants got a huge growth boost after all the nibbling was done!
I have snails and slugs in the garden - sometimes I relocate them but I also recently bought carnivorous snails at the nursery that did seem to cut down on the population. I don't know that they're available in all locations, though.
I'm glad you asked this question because I've often wondered myself what other vegans do about bugs - I'm most annoyed by earwigs and silverfish and little clothes eating moths in the house. As much as I don't like them, I go to the effort of catching them and tossing them into the back yard. I used sticky traps several years ago when I had an insanely bad gnat population in my houseplants - I think some bagged soil that I used started the problem. I was trapping as much as 200 a day. If I had the problem again I'd just put the plants outside, though.
Ha! I've actually had to deal with these, though not on my tomatoes! In the last novel I wrote the heroine was a novice gardener, and she had tomato worms! Being a vegetarian, she was queasy about dealing with them too!
Glad you released him elsewhere.
or option E could be "put the worm in a model plane and fly it around the neighborhood for no apparent reason." This is what one of my neighbors used to do....i really don't knw why or what he did with the worms afterwards, but yeah. Thos things scare me. no insect climbing around eating anything in my garden should get that big! My tomato plants are up on a second story patio this year so hopefully I will be spared tomato worms for the rest of the season.
That is a cute little worm, but I'd be pretty miffed if it was destroying my tomatoes. We try to keep our garden and lawn organic (try is the operative word, because our stupid neighbors spray their lawn with chemicals once a week, and I'm sure some of it runs off into ours- ugh.) Last year, our plants got infested with mites and fungus, and neem oil (which we found easily at home depot) worked wonders. We had to apply it several times though. Worth a try for the worms... although now that I think about it, I don't know if it will repel the worm or kill it. So I don't know if this is helpful or not!
i dont think we get thoose catipilars here. but when we dont get catipilars on our plants i tend to relocate them (i do the same with slugs/snails) :s. i just cant kill 'em
I don't like killing bugs either. I put them in a jar and bring them to my friend's house, where her chickens and ducks gulp them down. I don't feel bad about it because I didn't have to kill them and they served a purpose, and they won't reproduce (like that moth will!)
I often put my slugs and snails in the compost heap as I figure they might actually be doing some good in there, digesting all the scraps.
Neem oil is awesome for garden bugs, is not toxic to you, and has the pleasant side effect of being one of the best known natural mosquito repellants (catnip oil, which is vastly more expensive, is the other).
Don't get scammed by some of the websites you see. Neem ranges from stupidly expensive (bought as cosmetics) to stupidly cheap (when I was looking some years ago, a company in India was giving away a free gallon of the stuff if you promised you were going to use it for agricultural purposes).
The only drawback is that it smells like some sort of slightly off garlic preparation. If you're going to use it on yourself, dilution works well; use a spoonful in a spray bottle of fractionated coconut oil. Other oils are too heavy, and the coconut oil was formally tested in a lab and found to potentiate the effect of the neem.
...Or use the catnip; one teaspoon in a four-ounce spray bottle of frac coco oil is more than plenty, and catnip has a nice green vanilla-mint scent... it's the only thing that keeps the skeeters off me in Houston.
Those slimy pests never looked pretty before. Gr8 photos Susan and a lovely post. Love Domino..
I love that cat!
That is the scariest thing I've ever seen.
PS - Love your blog; I'm originally from Mississippi. I love seeing proof that you CAN be vegan in the South!
wow! great shot! guess it's not easy being green, as they say ;-)
Ugh *shudder* I'm not squeemish when it comes to bugs, but after a traumatic childhood incident, I can hardly look at them! I was just a kid when I was given the task of picking the tomato worm infestation off of our many plants. Unable to bring myself to take them to the dumpster as instructed, I took them to the far corner of the lawn and dumped them. Apparently, they didn't like the new location I'd chosen for them. A few hours later when I came running out of the house, barefoot, bounding across the lawn towards the trampoline for a late afternoon bounce, I'd gotten about half way there when my feet began to make contact with squishy disgustingness. I stopped immediately, only then actually gazing around to discover that the lawn was awash with tomato worms,inching their way back towards the garden, a couple of which had been crushed beneath my feet. Gah. Ugh. Shudder. Twitch. I guess the moral of this story is, if you're going to relocate them, relocate them far, far away, and not in the path of your trampoline...
ugh!
what is WRONG with you peepz
shiver
these things give me the hebegebees! My Momma's plants were covered in these hideous things , and when i visited her , i shuddered in disgust...poor Momma, tryin to get rid of em. so i told her how. Thanx! for the garlic tip! She had lemons and citrus in them......to no avail....some worms HATE citrus!
I'm enjoying your website and just stumbled onto the pictures of Domino. Is he a "Snowshoe"? I had a Snowshoe, Hobo (originally a stray), and Domino looks just like him all the markings and the blue, blue eyes and the freckles on his nose. I lost Hobo to diabetes, but your pictures bring him right back to me. Thanks for the memories.
I know this is an old post from you and I wonder if you have found a solution yet.
Try looking under companion planting and finding other plants that they like just as much as tomatoes or more and plant those plants near your tomatoes. Relocating them most likely will not solve the problem, it just makes it someone else's problem or the caterpillars then have a long trek to get to a food source that is acceptable to them.
If you really want to live and let live.. then find something else they like and plant it at the same time as your tomatos.. so everyone gets to eat what they like :)
Actually the one in the pictures is a tobacco hornworm. There is a difference. The tobacco hornworm has only 7 white lines on its back, its tail is red, while the tomato hornworm has eight lines on its back, and its tail is black.
The hornworm caterpillar I had last summer was infested with parasitic wasps, so I just left it alone until it was ... eaten from the inside out by parasitic wasps. In hindsight, that was pretty cruel.
Kathy in MD (a longtime loyal reader but infrequent commenter)
Somethings I've considered...
1. Hornworms can eat an entire pepper or tomato plant in NO TIME.
2. The way garden ecology works is this. You plant the plants, the plant-eating-bugs come and eat some of your plants, then the bug-eating-bugs come and eat the plant eating bugs. It take several seasons to build up a population of bug-eating-bugs, but will NEVER happen if you spray pesticides or even some universal organic sprays.
3. I read about a woman who trained her dog to eat the hornworms off the plant.
I consider myself to be vegan, or at least strict vegetarian, but I do kill bugs. Bugs that bite me, bugs that crawl on my bathroom walls, bugs that infest my dogs, and bugs that eat my plants. I think I can be OK with feeling compassion for pigs, chicken, cows, even fish, but when it comes to cockroaches, fleas, mosquitoes and hornworms, not so much.
Answer: I pick them off and put them in a bucket of soapy water. They die quickly and then I put them in the compost pile.
You don't want these things left to munch on your tomato and pepper plants - they can eat a plant you have been growing for a couple months in a couple of days - and that's always heartbreaking to watch. Tossing the worms in soapy water works wonderfully. I have also used Neem oil, which sent them packing very quickly. Another benefit of Neem is that it's not harmful to many of the beneficial insects in the garden - bees, ladybugs, earthworms and butterflies. If you can't bring yourself to kill them, you can always use one or two tomato plants as the bug hotels in your garden - every time you find hornworms, move them to the (preferably far off) area where they are welcome to nosh unabated. This will mean much more worm picking for you in the long run, but if it makes you happier, go for it!
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