Jan.......
Wait til you see one about 12 inches long, and FAT. You will never forget the experience. However, they are fairly easy to spot if you go outside at night with a flashlight and look for a long green eating machine.
The really gross thing then, is killing them.
Enjoy your Oklahoma gardening. It's full of all kinds of surprises! As any of us can tell you, even us kinda- newbies...in one way or another, it's Okie gardeners against mother nature around this part of the world.
You have the men shooting voles and gophers with shotguns, and the women, like Dawn, and me too...sicing our cats on em.

Barbara

Jan,
They have been everywhere I've ever gardened. And appear every year. And can ruin a plant in a day. Chickens love them. If not chickens then you have to kill them other ways. Jay

Well, I can I am the "odd man out", or at least the "odd woman out" in this case. I don't kill them and I don't find that they do much damage in my garden.

I have no particular fondness for the caterpillars themselves, but love the sphinx moths they morph into. When our son was about 10 or 12 years old, he "discovered" the moths and was so fascinated with them that I couldn't keep killing them with Bt. Actually, he'd seen them for years but for some reason at that age he became fascinated with them. He'd say "Mom, you aren't going to kill it, are you?" So, of course, I didn't kill "it".

I don't even use Bt on any plants that the hornworms eat because I don't want to hurt them. So, all I do when I see them is remove them from the tomato plant and put them on some other plant that they like. (They eat lots of different plants in the nightshade family and I have a lot of different plants that they like in addition to tomatoes.) And, despite the fact that I have over 80 tomato plants, probably 40-something pepper plants, and all kinds of daturas,I seldom see a hornworm at all....maybe 3 or 4 times a year I'll see one. I might lose 1 or 2 tomatoes to them a year and that doesn't bother me. Well, it might bother me if it was a Brandywine tomato, but other than that, it wouldn't. That also was true when I was growing 300-400 tomato plants every spring, so in our garden, substantially more plants did not give us a larger population of hornworms.

There are people who patrol their gardens daily and kill every hornworm they find. That is their perogative. I am in my garden daily, and often for much of the day, and seldom see one or the damage from one.

So, I have a couple of theories on why our garden is not overrun with them.

1.) There's lots of native nightshades growing in the acreage around us and they may be eating those plants.

2.) Our free-range poultry (free only during the day and locked up securely at night) might be eating them. Honestly, though, my poultry don't come into the veggie garden much--maybe once a month--but they do patrol around the exterior of the fence that surrounds the veggie garden.

3.) Mother Nature is hard at work here on our place. I rely on beneficial insects to keep problem insects under control, and for the most part it works. And, of course, not just beneficial insects, but birds, toads, frogs, lizards, turtles (I have a turtle story from yesterday for another thread), etc.

We haven't sprayed a broad-spectrum pesticide in the 11 years we've been here, and in the beginning we had tons of pest insects. We did all we could to attract beneficial insects, and did go through a huge phase for about 3 years where we had seemingly thousands of green lacewings and parasitic wasps and other beneficials everywhere. The huge numbers of beneficials told me we also had huge numbers of pests. Then, almost all of our beneficial insects disappeared although it didn't happen all at once, but just gradually there were fewer and fewer beneficial insets. Why? The obvious answer was because they had eaten up most of the "bad guys" and our little ecosystem here was in balance. So, I think that's why I seldom see hornworms even though you can't walk 3 steps in our yard without passing a plant they like to eat.

Do we still have pest insects? Yes. Do we still have beneficial insects and other beneficial animals? Yes. But, I think our little ecosystem is in balanace because I seldom see much damage to any plants in the garden and that tells me the beneficials are keeping the numbers of pest insects low.

So, kill them if you must, but we don't. Really, except for venomous snakes or spiders, or the occasional skunk that is out "acting crazy" during the middle of the day, we don't kill much of anything here. I'll hand-pick and kill a few pest bugs for which I seem to have no natural fast-acting predators....including potato bugs, squash bugs, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs and corn earworms. The hornworms, though? I like the moths and plant night-blooming plants to ATTRACT them.

And, I like to sit outside and look at the moon garden and watch the moths flitting around from plant to plant.

I don't quarrel with anyone's right, or choice, to kill any insect that is a problem in their garden. Sometimes I'll do it myself. Hornworms though? There's a beautiful moth in there just waiting to come out.

Just my opinion and also what works for us.

Dawn

That's interesting Dawn, since my natural inclination up until this forum has been in a "search and destroy" mode regarding pesky bugs. I'd been looking for them on all my plants. The other day I was inspecting my potato vines and noticed a really weird bug I'd never seen before. To describe him, he had what I'd call a "large bum". There was another little bug in front of him. I thought I might want to kill the big bum bug, but then on second glance, I noticed that he had the mate to the other little bug in his clutches and seemed to be devouring him...while the mate sat there looking on helplessly. I decided he was a good bug after all. I tell ya, it's an adventure in the garden everyday learning new things about the food chain, LOL

By the way, my potato vines in the bins are huge, and look really green and healthy, but I've seen only a few blooms on them. I haven't used any fertilizer on them, except the one bag of mushroom compost scattered around in the three humongous construction culvert sections about 3 ft tall my son dragged in that had been left over from a construction job somewhere. After that, all I did was pile up some really dry, dead and partially composted grass clippings. I tried to get some info on the web as to whether potato vines HAD to bloom to make tubers......with mixed results. Once source said no, they don't have to. Now, I am concerned! I planted these late due to the rains, as I recall, sometime in April.

Barbara

It is always interesting to read others experience. I know others move the horn worms. I have had them defoliate a plant in a day. So I've always fed them to the chickens or stomped them. In my opinion they are worse than a hail storm. Jay

Jay, I'm with you. If I see any damage then I am on a search and destroy mission. I have not had any on my toms since I moved here 8 years ago, but I have had them in other places. They died.

I've rarely seen them in my garden and they've done minimal damage before moving on (usually via a bird's digestive system). Since they've never been a problem for me, I just let them be. I'm lazy so always take the path of least resistance until forced to do otherwise. I do hate moths, though. I've got a little moth phobia going on -- If one comes near me, I run around flapping my arms and screaming like a city girl. LOL

About the only garden bug I'll do anything about is the squash bug. I pay my kids a penny each to pick them from the garden and feed to the chickens. They've been slacking lately because I was just out and noticed three million egg clusters. Argh.

Diane

Barbara,

As far as I know, potatoes do not have to bloom in order to form tubers. Growing up, I always thought they started forming tubers only after they had flowered, but research has shown that's not true either. So, as long as they are growing and look healthy, you'll get tubers sooner or later. Remember the old saying about "a watched pot never boils"? I have found that to be true with tomatoes, potatoes and peppers as well. As long as I am staring at green tomatoes and wanting them to change colors and ripen, they sit and stare back at me with a defiant "you can't make me ripen" attitude. Green peppers stay green forever too, and potato tubers look at the calendar and say to themselves, "let's make them wait a little longer".

When it comes to potatoes, flowering (and the resulting formation of small green potato seed balls that look like tiny tomatoes) is of more importance to professional breeders than to us home gardeners. We're going to get our potatoes (eventually) whether the plants flower a little, a lot or not at all. And, now that I've mentioned the little green potato balls that contain seed, I'll add that you are more likely to see them form when your potatoes bloom in cool weather.

If you remember when you planted the potatoes, you should have full-sized tubers ready to dig from 90-120 days after you planted them. For what it is worth, almost everything has been slow-to-mature and late this spring, which I attribute to colder nights that lasted later into the spring, and a lot of cloudy, rainy weather.

I've never yet seen one single potato plant that failed to turn yellow and start dying back when the tubers were full-sized, so all we have to do is be patient and the potatoes will be just fine....and they'll tell us when they're "done". My potatoes always seem to die back and be dug about 2 to 3 weeks after I thought they would be, and that last couple of weeks seems to drag on endlessly.

Dawn

Dawn....Thank you!

Whew! I am relieved about that puzzle being resolved. I can't believe how I obsess over these things!LOL... But this morning when I was "watching the potato pot", I got the same feeling.......it just wasn't time yet for them to do their thing! Anyway...I won't be reaching down in that deep mulch with my bare hands anytime soon either because of possible ((((((snakes)))))) ...

To connect the dots, from the issue of Genetically "engineered" organisms, (they like to call them), since now GMO is showing up even in potatos, shouldn't we begin the practice of either buying our seed potatos from known organic sources, even one's like you do, when you have to buy from the store such as Wild Oats, etc? and/or then saving our own seed potatos from season to season?
I didn't mean to drag this tomato horn worm issue off topic, but it sort of drifted that way, (with my help of course). Sorry.

Jay, I don't have chickens, or the great eco\-system as you and Dawn, but if I did, I might just let the biddys have a nice protein snack like you do, if they seem to enjoy them. Yuk But I am starting to be a dedicated bug watcher. Today I found an AMAZING HUGE bee like creature crawling around on my nasturtiums I'd placed near the tomato plants, getting nectar, pollen, whatever...and figured he was one of the good guys. Funny thing tho...I've seen hardly any bugs, good or bad in the garden, when in years past I had lady bugs all over the place. I do know for the year and a half I was mostly away on a job, that my son used some flea and tick granules on the lawn grass because of the cats.Probably a VERY bad idea. We did use some of the stuff around the yard on the ranch where I worked because the place was infested with seed ticks. It was horrible! They had cattle but no guineas or chickens for control. At my place, I've started wondering if the flea and tick granules killed off everything...good and bad. Time will tell. Maybe I can get things back in balance this year. I'm trying really hard! I've planted lots of companion plants such as parsley, alyssum, nasturtiums, bee balm, lemon balm, cat mint, sunflowers, petunias, zinnias, marigolds, and basil, and other aromatic herbs, some next to my tomatos and other veggies and melons, and some just scattered around the garden in various places. And now I also have an installed bat house. For the "normal" birds visting my corner of the world, do you think I should feed them to draw more, or not? Barbara

I have been moving the worms way to the other side of our property, I stomped one, and umm let's just say YUCK! I found 6 more this morning, and one tonight. If I had chickens believe me I would use them for chicken feed:) They really have stripped quite a bit of leaves off my plants and in a very short time. I appreciate everyones input. Smiled through a lot of the posts. Good information everyone, Thanks

The horn worms seem to take about 3-4 days to reach their full size from the time I find the tiny ones. I can't kill them. I just take them to a volunteer plant that I let grow just for that purpose and watch them grow. If you can find them the first day or two, the damage is not bad. They are hard to find then though. They are easy once they get full grown.

To me the "tomato worms" are like "corn worms" in that as a kid I looked forward to finding and collecting them so much it made me enjoy gardening. I still can't shake that.

Diane,

The city girl in me hates snakes and "she" doesn't much like touching any bug with her fingers, but I do like the moths. I especially like all the hummingbird moths that flit around the garden every evening at about the same time the bats are coming out.

Barbara,

I have ordered organic seed potatoes and lots of firms offer them, although some of them don't ship as early as we'd like in the winter. Wood Prairie Farm has an especially tantalizing selection. Anytime you order seed potatoes though, you pay a fortune in shipping.

I sometimes do buy and sprout organic potatos from grocery stores like Whole Foods or Central Market. Those are what I have started for fall planting.

The flea and tick granules probably didn't help the beneficials any and it may take several years for your ecosystem there in your landscape to totally return to normal. I do believe that if you have plantings to attract them, the beneficials will return more quickly. They'll only stay, though, if you have "bad bugs" for them to eat, and that is dependent upon how quickly your ecosystem rebounds from the use of the flea and tick granules.

I always have seed out for the birds, year-round. Some people don't feed seed during the warm season because they are afraid the birds will eat the seed instead of eating bugs. However, I feed just outside my garden and the birds sit on the garden fence, the scarecrow (he apparently is not scarey enough) and the tomato cages and eat bugs all day long. They mostly eat a little seed early in the morning and a little before twilight.

I love being surrounded by the birds. The cardinals sit in the trees and wait for me to put out sunflower seeds for them. The mourning doves are partial to cracked corn. The majority of the birds are just happy to have hen scrach with a little bit of sunflower seeds thrown in. This year a flicker has visited and eaten henscratch every morning and every evening since last fall. I assume it is always the same flicker, and I do see him looking for bugs throughout the day too.

One "unexpected consequence" of feeding the birds is that the birds become very territorial. That can be a very good thing. We have a huge issue with hawks preying on our free-range chickens and guineas during the daylight hours. This past winter, the crows started coming every morning and every evening to eat hen scratch in general, and cracked corn in particular. I wasn't happy about them, but let them be, figuring every creature has a role in the ecosystem, however annoying that creature might be. My reward for feeding the crows? They eat for only a few minutes in the morning and evening, but they chase away owls, hawks, kites, kestrels and other predatory birds all day long. All day long. Loudly. Very loudly. I used to find that "Caw! Caw! Caw!" very annoying, but now that I understand they are protecting their territory and our poultry, I don't mind it so much. LOL

The purple martins are the workhorses of bug-eating birds. We have two houses for them, and they also love to sit on the weather vane on top of the cupola that sits atop the garage/barn. When they are through swooping around in circles eating bugs, they sit on the electric lines and watch me work in the garden.

We don't have a bathouse, but we leave standing dead trees in our 10 acres of woodland for them, and we have bats during the warm months. They come out slightly later than the Purple Martins most evenings.

Don't forget hummingbirds too. Although they do eat nectar, they eat lots of bugs too, and so do dragon flies and damsel flies.

If there is anything at all that eats bugs, we do what we can to attract them here!

The only time we saw a significant drop in bird population here, by the way, was when we had a severe grasshopper infestation in the early 2000s. All the farmers and ranchers sprayed chemicals like mad and, since many chemicals are marginally effective on grasshoppers, we STILL had tons of hoppers. The bird population though virtually vanished.

We had a year or two with very few birds and almost no bees in our area. At our house, though, where no spraying occurred, we still had bees (though less than before) and we still had some birds. It took the various kinds of birds a long time to rebound, and I think the last ones to bounce back were the bluebirds. We didn't see a single blue bird for 3 years after the great grasshopper spraying summer.

The last two years, which have been very bad drought years (at least prior to this past April), we have even had roadrunners come to eat at the henscratch piles I put out for the wild birds. The roadrunners eat lots of pests too, so I am always happy to see them around.

One of my farmer/rancher neighbors complained to me for 3 straight years that he had no bees at all. I kept telling him we had plenty of bees and pollinators and our fruitset was just as good as always. We're only about a mile-and-a-quarter from him. He was very frustrated because he knew he'd done it to himself by spraying and killing off the bees and pollinators while attempting to kill the hoppers.

We had a fairly serious hopper outbreak 2 years ago and most of those same farmers/ranchers did not break out the heavy chemical arsenal this time, so maybe we're making some progress here! And, thankfully, we have good bee and bird populations again. Unfortunately, most people worry about combatting hoppers only after they are full-grown and have appeared in large numbers and are doing massive damage. I watch for them to hatch out. If they are hatching out early in January, I mentally keep track of how many I see and put out Nolo Bait while they are in the earliest instars if the population seems extra-heavy. I only use Nolo Bait once every 4 or 5 years and the birds keep them under control the reast of the time.

Jan,

I don't just have tomato hornworms, but the tobacco ones, and the ones that eat Virginia Creeper leaves, and the clearwing ones as well. I like them. I do understand the need to get them off the tomato plants, but I won't kill them. Watch the ones you have for little white things on their backs and don't kill those. Those are your beneficial wasps at work and they'll keep the numbers of hornworms down. On the attached link, page down beneath the photo of the good spined soldier bug on the tomato and you'll see the braconid wasp cocoons on the tobacco hornworm.

Here is a link that might be useful: Photo of Braconid Wasps on A Hornworm

Thanks again Dawn for the good information. Checking the link now.
Jan

Before I knew that hornworms, which I hated, became hawkmoths, which I loved, I used to stomp them. But now I just move them to the least desirable tomato plants in the garden and let them have it. For me that's usually Early Girl, which I grow because it IS early, but as soon as the better tasting tomatoes start bearing good, I sacrifice them to the hornworms. We don't see as many as we used to either although most years I do see three or four.

I confess I didn't know tomato hornworms turned into Hummingbird moths until this thread! The first time I ever saw one was one night sitting on my back steps by the moonflowers I'd planted. Totally freaked me out!

Oh, and I didn't know that Sphinx moths grew from caterpillars that sometimes hang all over Catalpa trees. When they got attacked by wasps that laid their eggs on them, that too looked pretty nasty.

Anyway, I suppose now I'll have to not kill any tomato hornworms and just transplant them, because the moths are very unusual and pretty. Disposable gloves maybe for the transplanting effort, LOL! Ewww!

I learn something new on this site just about every day!

Barbara

Here is a link that might be useful: Hummingbird Moth Images

I found my first one of the season yesterday. He had devoured almost a 1/4 of a small container plant. Will have to be on the watch out for several weeks now. Glad many of you don't seem to suffer the damage I do from them. Have never seen the white eggs on them many do. Guess we don't have that predator here. If something stays out of my garden they are left alone. But their fate is sealed once I find them in the garden. Jay

Jan, You're welcome.

Dorothy, I like your idea of moving them to Early Girl too. Like you, I only plant that variety for early tomatoes, and they aren't necessarily the earliest in my garden but they are pretty early. I don't care much for E.G. after the real tomatoes start ripening.

Barbara, You know, my dad always had tomato plants when I was a kid, and after we kids grew up a bit he had an even larger garden, and we always had hornworms, but I never made the connection between the two. It wasn't until Chris became fascinated with the hummingbird moths when he was a kid that I learned about the connection and stopped spraying my tomato plants with Bt.

We have many, many kinds of hummingbird moths here, although the majority of them are the white-lined sphinx and clearwing snowberry ones. I like them all.

Best of all, since we moved here, I have seen Luna moths several times which was so-o-o-o cool! Prior to that, I hadn't seen them since I was a kid. Now I watch carefully for them every spring. Since they only live a week or so, the window of opportunity to see them is fairly limited. Last year and this year, I don't think I saw any Luna moths, but in 2006 and 2007, I saw several each year. Ha! Now you have another moth to watch for!

Jay, I guess you hornworm was waiting for the rain and the cooler weather.

For several years, I stuck several "extra" tomato plants in a location abour 40' from the veggie garden moved hornworms to them. Then, over the years, as our beneficial insect population grew and grew, we had fewer and fewer hormworms and it got to where I didn't even have to move any hornworms because I so seldom saw them.

I certainly don't blame you for destroying the hornworms if they'e damaging your plants. If you don't have any native predators there to keep their numbers small, they could wipe out your crop in no time, and I understand that.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Image of a Luna Moth

I hope I don't jinx myself by writing on this thread. Maybe the reason that they don't bother my tomato plants here is the Virginia Creeper. I learned from this thread that hornworms like Creeper. In NE Oklahoma Creeper comes up in every flower bed and around our tress. That stuff sends out runners five feet long on top of the ground sometimes. I think it could grow up through asphalt. I can't believe that some people actually plant that stuff. It is a weed in my yard.......but if it feeds hornworms....and they don't eat my tomatoes. Well, I'm liking it a little better. LOL

I was looking at some of the pictures and seems I can't tell the difference between the good guy Spined Soldier Bug and the bad guy Stink Bug.

Any thoughts?

Carol,

The moths that eat my Virginia Creeper are the tannish-brown Pandora sphinx moth cats, not tomato hornworms. There are many kinds of hummingbird moths, and most of their larvae eat something other than plants in the tomato family. I've linked a photo of a Pandora cat below. That's the one you're likely to see on Virginia Creeper.

Hank,

Let me address the differences in stink bug and spined soldier bug on a separate thread so they won't get lost in this tomato horn worm thread.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Image of Pandora caterpillar

Picked two more off today. One was on one of the last container plants that spent last week struggling with the heat and then looked spry last night and a few bare stems this morning. Another tonight on another plant. So will have to do a check twice a day till they are gone. Usually seems like a couple of weeks where they are the heaviest. Jay

I found one of the green monsters on one of my paprika pepper plants I am growing in a container. It had a 1" diameter pepper on it and the plant looked very healthy. KEY WORD WAS HAD! The little villian had devoured the top half of the plant and was making its way through pepper when I caught it. He had eaten half of the pepper. He did all of this damage in one night. I couldn't wait for the Barconid Wasps to take hold it would have been too late for this plant and probably many others.

Where does the month lay their eggs? I would like to be able to find these long before they can do serious damage. This one was already approaching 2 1/2" long. At these length does anyone know how old they are?

Bruce
Mustang

Bruce,

The moth generally lays the small greenish-whitish eggs on the backs of plant leaves or, less often, on the upper surface of the leaves, but you also can find them on peppers, eggplants and daturas as well if you are growing those plants or on wild members of the solanacea family. It takes the caterpillar about 3 to 4 weeks to go from tiny to full-sized, and I think they usually are full-sized at about 3 1/2" to 4 1/2" long. So, if you had one that was 2 1/2" long, it probably was about 2 weeks old or maybe a couple of days beyond 2 weeks.

After they reach their full size, they drop down into the soil as a pupa.

Dawn

oh man I am going to feel so awful about saying this now..... my first tomatoes I planted 2 years ago were DEVOURED in a day from 20 of these guys! They ate them ALL and left nothing but stems. I got a handful of tomatoes that year and the year after that. Being quite the 'I will show them' kind of gardener I planed about 20 extra tomato plants this year and bought a bunch of chickens. Last night I found 5 Hornworms that devoured 3 of my plants already and my chickens dont eat them!!!! UUUGGGGGG I even picked a few off and put it in my hand as an offering to them but they all just looked at me like "Dont expect me to touch that nasty fat thing!". I was so mad last night stomping around like a kid who was beat YET AGAIN...... maybe now I will just pick them off and let my young boys try to raise them into moths. Let someone get some joy out of these hungry worms. :)

It's been a war here in Mustang. I think I am slowly winning it. I found a large 3-4" "green goo monster" this morning on one of my eggplants. Poor thing...green goo went everywhere.

Evening before last I found a couple on my tomato plants in the large garden. One was a baby less than an inch. You have to look hard to find them. I took it to show my 12 year old daughter. She said "GROSS DAD!"

Once I see some damage I don't leave the plant until I find these hungry critters.

PERSAVERANCE WILL PREVAIL!

Bruce

Found a 5 inch HW on my tomatoes and he'd completely devoured every single leaf on my largest and most productive tomato plant (the mystery one lol) and picked him off. Found four more on other plants, smaller and picked them too. Drowned them in soapy water. Later that night I found 2 more. Did the same.
Next morning went out for some BT...by the time I came back there were 8 more and now they were on my potatoes! I hate these damn things. They're convinced they're going to take over! But they've got another thing coming.

We're on a 3 times a day check on our plants...every one of these suckers it going to die!

For those of you who like to keep em, that's your choice but I don't want them anywhere near me, no matter how cool the moth turns out to be.

I need chickens bad, they could really help.

Mandy

In the past three days I've found 8 HW on my 15 plants. They are everywhere.

Dannigirls_garden...
Growning up we always fed them to chickens. I'm surprised yours wouldn't eat them.

Yesterday was the first day I hadn't at least one since the 21st. Picked a max of 5 one day I believe. They have done their damage. Pulled one plant and feel another is probably done. And it was really nice. Yes my chickens have always loved them. So don't understand why yours don't like them. I'm envious of those that don't have severe damage from them. Wish I didn't. Jay

The count here in our OKC garden is one so far, about 3 inches long. He ate about a quarter of the foliage from one of three Cherokee Purple plants (which are awfully fussy about setting fruit in this scorching heat it seems)I showed my six-year old son the vile critter and told him he could do anything he wanted with it as long as he didn't put it back in our yard. Soooo......I go inside for a cold drink, come back out and nonchalantly ask
"What'd you do with the worm?"
"I threw it in the neighbor's pool."
LOL
By the way I do not endorse this method as a hornworm eradication technique.

stay cool everyone
Dale

Dale,

That is so funny. I love kids and the way their minds work. My daughter is 12 and is somewhat of a tomboy. She will touch bugs my 15 yr old son won't go near. Go Figure. She loves being outdoors and she loves going to the garden right now and collecting baby frogs. The gardens are loaded with them right now. She will go out their every night and collect 10-12 and put them in her bug viewing container. She will bring them to me every night and say "Dad look how many I got tonight" I say "Awesome... don't forget to put them back in the garden so they can eat bad bugs."

I tried giving her a tomato hornworm the other night. She wouldn't touch it. She was amazed at how big it was. She thought the horn was a stinger.

Stay cool and wet,
Bruce

I found six of these worms on my tomato plants the other day and googled "tomato worm" to see what they turn into. I learned from what seemed like a very serious scientific site that each moth only lays ONE egg. Doesn't that seem incredible? I never heard of any bug that only lays one egg. Does anyone have any information about this?
Ann

Maybe her HW was too big and the chickens are picky? LOL. I don't know. But talked to my Dad and he said if the chickens won't eat em Guineas will. Try giving it to a guinea if you have em (or if you have em running wild like we do).

Success this morning...no HW and I checked thoroughly :-p Hopefully another check tonight will be as successful.

Good luck against the green goo beasties y'all.

Mandy

I pulled off about 20 of them and threw them out of my raised bed garden into the weedy grass. Looked later and every one of them was heading back to the garden. One was climbing up the raised edge. So they are in Hornworm Heaven now. They ate big chunks out of all the wonderful tomatoes that I've slaved over and almost all the leaves. Overnight. That's gardening! : )

I pulled 4 off yesterday. Around 27 so far. Two plants have had two both at different times. I pulled one plant because of the damage. And a few other have been really set back. They are like a rattlesnake to me. If they want to live they had better stay out of my view. I don't go hunting them outside my garden but if they intrude on my garden they are goners once I find them. Jay

Ann,

That site was not correct. Since I didn't see it, I don't know how they stated it, but some scientists say that they lay the eggs singly....laying one egg each time they visit a leaf. That part is true (more or less), but they make many return trips and lay many eggs. More current research indicates they lay from 1 to 5 eggs per visit and each moth can lay up to 2000 eggs, which would require a lot of visits.

When I find a bunch of eggs on the back of a leaf, it usually is somewhere in the range of 30-60 eggs in one little batch. (I'm guessing at the number--I've never stood there and counted them.)

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: OSU Hornworm Info

yea i think the HW was too big, plus my chickens are only 5 months old and not laying yet, so that could have been part of it too. They chase grasshoppers and potato beetles like mad, but get them around a HW and they run the other direction like its going to eat THEM! LOL I really want some guineas for my squash bugs this year. I need to look around to see if i can find someone in my area with some.

~Danni Girl

They found my garden today. normally I pull 1-2 every week or two, but today i found 4, and about half of the current fruits hollowed out. between that and last week's wind knocking down my cages several times, with all plants damaged and one severed near the ground, I think things are about over, unless the worms move away and they rebound in the cooler weather that will theoretically come in a few weeks. So far we've gotten about 30 tomatoes off of 5 (now 4) plants, less the dozens split by the erratic rains, blown off by the wind, or now, devoured by the worms.

*sigh*

It's been that kind of year for a lot of folks.

Sorry about all the damage and frustration. Surely next year will be better.

And, if it cools off pretty soon, the plants may rebound. My plants that were devoured by hornworms in July have put out new growth so I think they're rebounding fairly well.

To help keep it in perspective...at least you have those 30 tomatoes. Many home gardeners/commercial growers in the approx. 25 states affected by the severe and early onset of Late Blight (Phytopthera infestans) have lost all their tomato plants without getting one ripe fruit. By comparison, we've been pretty lucky here.

I have been fighting the hornworm war all summer.Back in June I thought I had won it but they came back and in great numbers. So far this season I have probably killed 50 or 60 of them. I am checking my plants every day. My spring plants are large enough to sustain damage without much trouble and fortunately they are not attacking any fruit here just the foliage.

I do have one Red Rocket plant that I transplanted a month ago for a fall crop that did sustain severe damage...not sure it will make it.

Bruce

As Mad-Eye Moody would say, "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"

I found a half dozen or so of them last night as I was tying up plants and a half dozen more today. Most annoying were the two in the process of eating tomatoes. On the plus side, it looks like I'll actually get tomatoes this year from the plants I started from seed. Yay.

I had trouble most of the summer. Pulled over 50. Finally gave in and sprayed once with BT and once with spinosad and haven't had any more trouble. Will start earlier next year. They killed two plants and hurt several others when they were small. Red Defender and a few others have came back and look good now. On the bigger plants they don't hurt much. On the smaller ones they either kill them or set them back 3-4 weeks. I have seen hail do less damage than these voracious creatures. They eat 24/7. Jay

We found them again this year . We lost a plant or two last year to them and were waiting for them to show up.. We had just said.. Hey, no sign of our green friends yet.. a little early as the next morning the tip top of a green pepper was cleaned off and just a few tomato leaves. We found about 10 and after a powder dusting, we found more that had dropped. We throw them over our fence to an empty dirt lot.. wonder if they can make it back to our greenery?? anyone know?

My son just told me he saw about 8 on the patio in the afternoon.. so we need to recheck for eggs and more of the buggers. What a pain. I hate that they can do so much damage so fast and in a small garden like ours, we would have little left. Ironically, the green pepper we got about 10 small peppers off of this year was the plant they ate last year and the first one we found them on this year.

Happykat, Yes, they'll travel back to your yard and garden. I live in a rural area where the pastures and fencelines are full of native nightshade plants that they feed upon and I see them crawling across the road to reach another pasture all the time. Sometimes they travel down the road and not across it, so apparently they like to move around.

Plus, if you're allowing them to live, then they are going to procreate and give you many more hornworms. Who needs that?

By destroying the ones you find, you are hopefully ensuring you'll see fewer next year. If you let them live, their children and grandchildren likely will visit you next year.

Dawn