-
And then a flea bit me, and I squashed it
Just found a really splendid 3 inch Hornworm on my row of Cream Sausage tomatoes (they’re cream-colored paste tomatoes). The plants are fat and resilient, so the caterpillar damage was not noticeable; I only knew it was there when I discovered some large droppings and followed them to the source. But on closer inspection I did find nibbled places on 3 or 4 of the fruits, so I removed the caterpillar to a vase full of tomato leaves on the back porch.
If these guys start attacking my plants in force, I may get to feeling less sentimental about ‘em. But for now…hell, I prune my tomatoes regularly as it is, to keep them down to 1-3 main vines, so there’s always tomato foliage going spare. Besides which, these aren’t like the squash borer caterpillars, which don’t restrict themselves to just taking a few leaves but almost always kill the whole plant. And hornworms become Sphinx moths, which are cool. And I still remember fondly the tomato hornworms they had in an insect petting zoo at the natural history museum in DC.
