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| Tomato Horn Worm |
We finally had a wonderful rain yesterday that cooled everything off and filled 2 of our rain barrels. Joy Joy and I went for a walk around the garden last night to see the happy well watered garden and found that something had eaten over half, and a half of our 2 biggest, still green tomatoes! We could not find the culprit, who I said probably hid from the rain, but it will be back in the morning. Sure enough! The girls went out this morning and found it. They hoped it would cocoon so
we looked it up
here and found out that they drop off the plants and borrow into the ground to pupate.
So here is our new pet. We shall see if he does his thing and turns into a moth. His smaller siblings met their fate in the chicken pen. We will be checking for more of them in the days to come.
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Zucchini plant with Vine Borer in it.
The bug was fed to the chickens. |
Sadly all our Zucchini, pumpkin and Acorn plants had to come up because of Squash Vine Borer. We planted some watermelon in the kids 4-H plots in place of their pumpkins and hopefully they will do well.
I am going to have plenty of space for a fall garden.
My goodness-those tomato worms are huge! We don't have them up here (well, we don't really grow tomatoes outdoors in Alaska at all), so I've only seen them in books. I thought they were like little maggots. Wow! Up here, my biggest nemesis with my zucchini are nasty slugs. :S I can't wait to peruse the rest of your 'homestead'!
ReplyDeleteBlessings,
Hillary At Home
If you slit the vine, remove the vine borer and bury the damaged section of vine you can sometimes save the vine, as the vine will root from that section or just above the damage and keep the vine going. I have had about a 75% success ratio with this, you know in a couple of days because the plant bounces back quickly or it just continues to die. Tell your Hubby Falcon15 from the Survival Monkey says hello! I love your blog. Makes me feel great that my family is not the only one out there doing this stuff...
ReplyDeleteDear Hillary, Thank you for commenting on my blog! I had not seen these monster Horn worms in person before either. He is even bigger now. That tomato in the picture is almost gone and we threw in another that had fallen of the plant.
ReplyDeleteI hope he turns into a moth!
Hey Falcon15, I did try that but it was so HOT here that I think that we couldn't keep it watered enough. I am doing my homework to find out how we can avoid them altogether next year.
ReplyDeleteFrank says hi. :-) So glad you are enjoying my blog!