Q&A: Tomato Hornworms

The Beginner's Garden with Jill McSheehy

Jill McSheehy

Gardening, Garden, How To, Education, Organicgardening, Home & Garden, Leisure, Homegardening, Beginninggardener, Vegetablegardening

4.4 • 734 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2020

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What to do about tomato hornworms? Any tomato grower seems to have to deal with hornworms. If you find evidence of this pest, what should you do about them? I share my experience today.

Why I don’t prune my tomatoes: https://journeywithjill.net/gardening/2019/05/14/is-pruning-tomato-plants-necessary/

Organic Pesticides with Joe Lamp’l: https://journeywithjill.net/gardening/2020/06/08/organic-pesticides-how-to-use/

Organic Cabbage Worm Control: https://journeywithjill.net/gardening/2019/04/09/5-organic-cabbage-worm-pest-control-methods/

Beginner's Garden Podcast past episodes: journeywithjill.net/podcast

Vegetable Gardening for Beginners Book: https://amzn.to/2SYe4wy

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What to do about tomato hornworms? In today's Q&A, I'm actually going to bring you a question that I personally had earlier this month.
0:11.1	Tomato hornworms are the bane of any tomato growers' experience, at least that's my experience and from what I've seen of you guys online.
0:21.4	You walk outside to your beautiful tomato plants and you find leaves and stems just stripped gone.
0:29.7	And then if you look closely, you might see some black barrel shaped droppings on the leaves
0:35.6	and you know that you've got a problem. If you have a keen eye,
0:39.4	you can find that green little worm hiding on one of the branches, but sometimes they are
0:45.2	really hard to find. What do you do about tomato hornworms when you know that you have them?
0:51.7	Let me share with you my experience so far this year before I get to
0:54.8	the question. I did what I always do. I search and I find the hornworm. I pick it off as
1:01.2	icky as it is and I feed it to the chickens. Now I haven't been so fortunate to have seen those
1:07.0	little white egg-like sacks on the top of the hornworm, which are actually the eggs of
1:12.8	the parasitic wasp. If I had ever seen one of those, which I'm hoping I will someday, I definitely
1:18.2	wouldn't have fed it to the chickens. I would have left it there because once those hornworms
1:23.9	are parasitized, they're not going to be eating anymore and you definitely want
1:27.6	those little parasitic wasp babies to have a host once they hatch but anyway since that
1:34.4	didn't happen to me i definitely try to look for the hornworm pick it off throw it to the chickens
1:38.9	i don't like to i've never sprayed for tomato hornworm. It's always a matter of going out in my garden
1:45.0	every day looking for damage, finding the worm, picking it off. Personally, I don't prune my tomatoes,
1:51.3	so all of my tomatoes so far have been able to take a little bit of damage and be just fine.
1:56.6	That's another reason that I've found it to be beneficial not to prune my tomatoes. But that's a whole other podcast episode.
2:02.6	Look in the show notes.
2:03.8	We'll drop a link in there if you're curious as to why I don't prove.
	...

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