What's up everyone? Welcome back to the show, the epic gardening show. My name is

Kevin. Today I walked outside and saw a tomato hornworm on an old tomato plant. Now it's not a big deal for me because I'm not growing any

more tomatoes for this season. So I snapped a couple pictures of it and went on my way. But if you are still growing tomatoes or the tomato hornworm is hitting you in a different plant, well, this is the episode for you. We're going to talk about how to identify the tomato hornworm, which is actually pretty easy, and how to control it.

So let's get started. Now most of you will have had some familiarity with the tomato hornworm if you haven't it is a huge

Caterpillar all things considered and it also has really distinct markings. It is very big, it's green, and it has white and black

diagonal stripes on the side that make it really obvious and really identifiable.

Now, the interesting thing about this,

a hornworm is that it turns into a massive moth,

the Manduka quincwayaculata, which I think I said correctly.

And it will hit, the hornworm at least, will hit tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, tobacco,

etc. It will destroy plants especially at the beginning of their life.

It will chew the fruit, it will eat the stems, it will eat the entire leaves, and it's

actually very hard to see because even though they're large, they're so

well camouflaged you can look directly at them and then you'll just completely

miss them which is pretty interesting. It's a little annoying because you see one you say

how did I miss that? Well they're deceptively hard to see. Well most people

control these by hand-picking them because they are just so large.

They're not like tiny little aphids.

It would take forever to hand pick something like an aphid.

But tomato hornworms are so big.

You can scan and handpick and try to disrupt the life

cycle that way. A lot of things can destroy them as well. There are beneficial

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