So I was harvesting San Marzano tomatoes today…
…and placing them in a five gallon bucket…
…with visions of delicious salsa dancing through my brain…
What the…? I had just walked past the end of the San Marzano
tomato row and saw this… a tomato hornworm approximately three to four feet
from the end of the row, that is, from the area of its nourishment.
My first thought was, “I hadn’t noticed any hornworm
damage.” So I looked to the row of San Marzanos…
Ah, there it is! Can you see it? The picture is small, I
know. Try this one…
This picture is more close up. As you can see, there are no
leaves on the top branches to the left. The tomato hornworm devours the foliage
of tomato plants. Luckily, tomatoes grow many, many side shoots so that the
hornworm damage almost never actually kills a plant… but they are nasty
creatures nonetheless.
So, back to the hornworm… (By the way, they are called
“hornworm” because of the horn on their nether region, which you can barely see
here at the lower part of the hornworm in the picture.)
Horn worms are feisty, and nasty critters. I attempted to
slip it up on this board for better viewing, but it refused. This one was
actually somewhat small for “full size”, but I shall explain. The length of
this worm was somewhere between three and four inches. They can get as large as
six inches as I have witnessed in the past. What intrigued me with this one was
that I have never witnessed the end of a horn worm cycle, as in, once it finishes
growing in the worm stage it burrows into the ground to pupate into its moth
form. This worm was obviously attempting
to get to pupate to the moth stage… but, alas, I arrived!
And so did one of my tomato de-hornwormers, aka. Pruner! I
realize it appears rather docile at the moment. I am referring to the tomato
de-hornwormer…
…but it can be aggressive! Notice here, it is about to
attack! Alas, the poor, ill-fated hornworm did not make it. (And there was much
rejoicing. Yea.)
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