I think next year I should plant even more tomatoes! :-))

Usually most people just hand pick although they are hard to see. But if you carefully look at your tomato plants each day you will quickly see any damage and stripped leaves. All I have ever done is hand pick when necessary. But be warned, often more than one!

You can spray your tomato plants with BT. But you have to keep doing that each week and too much work for me.

A few days ago I did see all the signs of hornworm on one of the porch tomatoes out front. You know, the branches stripped of leaves. But no matter how much I looked I could not find one. So I cut off the damaged branch and made careful note of where it was. But no more damage and I never found the hornworm. I am sure my helpful backyard birds found it for me. I bet the catbirds ate it!

Here is a link that might be useful: BT info

Thanks, Rita. I tried picking them off the plants (after I put gloves on, of course), but those suckers really stick to the plants. Evidently I am quite a wuss, because it was grossing me out -- gloves or no gloves. So I sprayed them with Sevin, but they weren't dying quickly enough for me. I might have to try your BT. It's very disheartening to see the little green tomatoes that have been half-eaten by these worms.

I agree they really are gross. Try putting some cheapo bird seeds very near your tomato plants. The idea is to get the birds into the plants. They will gladly carry off any hornworms that they see and they really have sharper eyes for these things than us people do.

I have tons of birds here. This spring they would always go into the new tomato garden and I wondered what they were doing. Well, I had Kale planted betwen the rows and the Catbirds were picking off the Cabbage looper worms. Kind of like a fast food resturant for our feathered friends.

What a great idea! My bird feeders are on the other side of the garden, but I'll try to lure them over to the tomatoes.

I usually don't notice them, until I start getting bare branches. I've found that at that point, if you look closely in or below the defoliaged area, you can usually see piles of droppings from the hornworm (yech!). If you look straight up from those droppings, you can usually find the hornworm - either there, or nearby. (In other words, I find it easier to look for the droppings first, than to try to find the green worm.)

We used to get them in abundance every year at our old house. Since we moved (10 years ago), last year was the first time that we had them, and we only had a few. (The resident birds may have been a help there.) I hope that they don't show up again this year!

(No dust, no spray, hand pick here. Ugh!)

Good luck with your creepies!

The BT spray really is too much work for me. But we have so many birds here and they really do a great job on keeping down the insect pests.

I have some big pinchers I use to get them off the plants,I am not about to have them in my fingers, gloves or not.

jean

Lol @ Jean...

I do almost all of my gardening in disposable vinyl gloves. (I have some medical issues, and I can't stand the loss of dexterity that I get using traditional gloves, be they cloth or leather.) While I wouldn't ever pick up one of those with bare hands, I feel safely protected with the gloves!