I had a bunch of extra tomato plants that I plated in the garden kind of off to the side and haven't bothered with much. This morning I was picking some ripe tomatoes off them so they wouldn't seed next year and noticed a few of big fat hornworms snacking on the plants lol. I let them do their thing since they were kind enough to stay away from my main tomato plants, but thought I would share some pics of them.
Tomato hornworms
- Thread starter pepper
- Start date
Lol! It's amazing how much those things eat, it's non stop. I went back out in the evening to see what's going on and they were still munching away. If someone only had a few tomato plants it wouldn't take long for them to eat every leaf off them.
I cut a tomato stem with a tomato hornworm on it, brought it inside, laid it on a strip of paper towel, just so I could watch. Most pests don't want an audience! This character did not care one bit. It munched it's way along in such a tidy, methodical, focused path from
one leaf to the next! It amazed me how quickly it made its way up that stem with such a tiny mouthpart! Pooping the entire way!!
I thanked him for his performance right before I flushed him.
I read that a good way to find tomato hornworms is to go out after dark with a blacklight flashlight, which I decided would be a fun
thing to do with my little g'dau. They did indeed show up like purple neon.
