Oh, Nooo!! What Are They?

Gardening should have always a permanent surveillance. If gardeners don’t monitor the garden constantly. After I checked the place, the soil looked good, weeds almost gone, no signs of early blight in tomatoes, nor the mildew powder in zucchinis. Life in the garden looked almost perfect -- until I noticed that some of the tomato leaves were suddenly blighted. This was an alert!  

 We found seven awful tomato hornworms...picking them off was an uncomfortable experience.

We were delighted with the previous rain. As usual, we stopped and checked the chopped tomato leaves, suddenly I touched something that looked as a pickled cucumber with a thicker bumpy skin growing as if this were part of the tomato plant! Imagine a texture like that on a tomato. Absolute nonsense!  It was a hornworm. Its size was about 3 1/2 to 4 inches (7-10cm) – I had never seen one since I started to grow vegetables and flowers in this country back in 2007.

Knowing About the Tomato Hormworm Tomato Hornworms are the larva of a huge moth called five-spotted hawkmoth. Approximate size of the moth is around the size of a hummingbird. It is gray-brown with yellow spots on the sides of their body.

Hornworm Lifecycle
The five-spotted hawkmoths lay their eggs as soon as they mate after hatching. They appear in late June to August. Full grown larva (3-4 weeks feeding) wander around the garden digging themselves in where they form a pupa (brown and about 3cm long) that overwinters and hatches in the spring.


How To Control Tomato Hornworms

1. Use a liquid Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) does not harm animals, people or the environment. It paralyzes the horn worms and they die from starvation. Spray the top and bottom of the tomato plant leaves. 
2. Spraying the undersides of the leaves with an insecticidal soap mixture kills the eggs at the first sign of seeing the moths. 
3. Parasitc Wasps (Braconid and Trichogramma) lay their eggs on the larva. If you see little white things on the worm don’t kill the worm, place it in a jar with a fresh leaf and keep feeding it until the wasps do their job. These are the cocoons of the wasp and their larva feed inside the host and will kill it. 
4. Hand Pick. Tomato Hornworms are so big you cannot miss these guys.
5. Companion Planting. Plant marigolds as a deterrent around or between your tomatoes. Marigolds stink to a lot of different bugs and they avoid them.

Source: http://organicgardensite.com/bugs-harmful/tomato-horn-worms/

Hand picking and Bt spray have been applied to the garden!