It's THEM!

Tomato gardeners are a strange bunch.  We spend hours during the winter planning our gardens, choosing which plants we're going to plant and making our decisions based upon their good points and their bad points. We trade for seeds; we plant them in the perfect medium, and, when the time is right, we plant them in carefully prepared soil.  We hover over them like a hummingbird hovers around a nectar laden flower, wearing a path between each plant.  Then, when we think they are protected against the elements, against all critters, we find plants stripped of leaves, almost denuded.  Tomato gardeners beware!  Hornworm season is upon us.

Hornworms are truly gross & disgusting critters.  Masters of disguise, they are hard to spot when small on the plants.  When large, many times they look like a curled leaf.  They are the perfect shade of tomato green but with a nasty looking spike tail, white stripes and "eyes" down their sides.  And, to make it worse, they are HUGH, like 4" long huge.  I recently found out, when you try to pry them off the plant, they throw their head around, back & forth, and make noise.  Yeah…  noise.  That really grossed me out.  The noise reminds me of the noise that the giant ants make in the cult Sci-Fi flick, "Them".  (How appropriate, giant caterpillars in NM make noises like giant nuclear ants in NM.).

For the past couple of weeks, I've been on hornworm patrol, policing my tomato plants two and three times a day.  Still, I'm finding them.  I have a lovely heirloom tomato that they seem to have a preference for - a Black Russian. These things seem to be ignoring the yellow cherry tomato and the Red German Queen, but they love the black tomato plant!  So, I continue the war against the hornworms, turning over leaves, picking them off and throwing them into the road to become road kill. I also leave the smaller ones in the birdbath for the birds, which readily scarf them up.

I hope that hornworm season ends soon, preferably before my tomato is stripped or before I start screaming, "THEM!  THEM! THEM!!!!"