Coelho Natural Farm, LLC: Tomato Hornworm…EEWWW!

One of the challenges of gardening without insecticides is, well, dealing with pests. We are putting out natural deterrents for the grasshoppers, always using something edible to us but harmful to them. We have a great deal of help from a family of roadrunners that has claimed this property. The roadrunners are quite entertaining and deserving of their own post, but it will have to wait until I can capture those voracious birds on camera.

The roadrunners have not yet figured out how to find the disgusting, wait – I mean – juicy, tasty, treat of the tomato hornworm. One hornworm can defoliate a nightshade family plant (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) in short order. We knew we were at risk of these evil caterpillars when we saw so many of the adult moths ramming our bright flashlight during our late walks and also hitting the windows at night. “The adult moths, sometimes referred to as a "sphinx", "hawk", or "hummingbird" moths, are large, heavy-bodied insects with narrow front wings. The tomato hornworm moth is a mottled gray-brown color with yellow spots on the sides of the abdomen and a wingspread of four to five inches. The hindwings have alternating light and dark bands.”[i] These moths lay their eggs on the leaves of the nightshade plants.

Picture by Didier Descouens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46972574

Shown here is damage done to one of our plants in less than 24 hours:

Shown here are the defoliating culprits. Big! We find one per plant and have removed about 20 so far.

One the bright side, we have hundreds of healthy tomato plants. We can pick these nasty creatures off each morning and keep the damage to a minimum and keep them from reproducing a second time this season.

We have many rows of healthy tomatoes, here is an example of a two.