Thuricide, with the active ingredient of Bt 'kurstaki', is a good product. It has been around a long time and works well.

Having said that, Bt 'kurstaki' will kill not only pest caterpillars but all caterpillars, so if you enjoy having butterflies and moths flying around your yard and garden, be sure you're careful to spray it only on the targeted vegetable plants and not on flowering plants frequented by butterflies and moths.

One of the best ways to help control caterpillars naturally is to plant lots of companion plants with small flowers to attract beneficial insects like brachonid wasps which prey upon the caterpillars. I grow lots of chamomile, dill, fennel, yarrow, sweet alyssum, verbena bonariensis, tansy, and other herbs, including lemon balm, catnip and catmint, whose flowers attract the beneficial insects. Those plants are scattered all over the garden. I also use companion plantings of borage and basil within my rows of tomatoes. Usually I have one borage or basil plant in between every 2 tomato plants. I have a minimum of 100 tomato plants in the ground every year and rarely see a caterpillar of any kind of my plants or find any damage from them on the fruit. I think the beneficial insects get the credit for controlling the caterpillars for the most part, because I rarely use Thuricide. (I'd use it happily if needed, but just don't need it.) I also grow ornamental four o'clocks all over our property, but especially on three sides of our veggie garden. They are said to repel hornworms. I have no idea if it really works except for the fact that I almost never find a hornworm in my garden or hornworm damage in my garden. Once, in a bad year, I found 8 tomato hornworms in my garden in August. Most years I find none, even though they are common in our rural area and I sometimes even see them crawling across the road when I'm out walking the dogs. (It freaked me out the first time I saw a big green hornworm crossing the road.)

If you are having issue with other types of worms like tomato fruitworms (they are the same ones called corn earworms when found in ears of corn), be sure you are not planting tomatoes in spring in an area where corn grew the previous year.

I think you'll be happy with how well Thuricide works.

If you are having issues with the very tiny tomato pinworms, that's a whole different issue.

Dawn

Dawn, I've always been afraid to grow tansy, as I understand it is poisonous to cattle and invasive. Do you find it invasive? I have also heard four oklocks are invasive, do you find them go be a problem?

*sob*

haha, had to say that for Soonergrandmom's benefit :) She likes to laugh at me because I like the moths!

If you ever grow lemon balm, you will never have to sow it again. It is marching through my flowerbeds like its plan is world domination!

Lisa

I picked 1 hornworm off yesterday. I can usually stay up with them as long as I am careful about checking for them.

Rick

Thanks Dawn, I wish I had room for plants in my garden , but right now its only 18 X 20 ft. , so I will spray.

Companion planting is an interesting concept though, maybe I can find some space around the backyard.

I can only identify the hornworm, and I don't usually see those till late July or August. The biggest problem I had last year , was a worm that bored into the tomato. I've no idea what its called. The caterpillar I saw this week , was bout an inch long and green.

Fortunately, I will have to spray again, my Wednesday application was washed off by an inch of rain yesterday morning :) , I won't complain :) .

This post was edited by LCDollar on Fri, Jun 13, 14 at 8:52

Amy, We don't have cattle, so I don't have to worry about them eating the tansy, and if cattle escape from nearby ranches they cannot reach through or over the woven wire fencing that surrounds the garden (it is 8' high) to eat the tansy anyway. Both tansy and four o'clocks can be invasive in good soil and with decent moisture, but I just yank out the seedlings I don't want when they first appear. All my four o'clocks grow outside the garden fence, and I try to yank out any seedlings that pop up inside the fenced garden. Yes, they are invasive, and I grow them anyway and love them anyway. They are one of the few plants I can grow outside the garden fence that deer will not devour, so over time as they deer ate everything else I've ever planted outside the garden fence, the four o'clocks just spread into the space vacated by the deer-devoured plants. Now we have a massive area of four o'clocks and the deer don't touch them.

Lisa, I love the moths too and plant daturas and brugmansias just for them. I also usually stick some extra tomato plants outside the garden fence, so if I do happen to find a tomato or tobacco hornworm on anything in the garden, I can move them to the plants outside the garden. I also plant nicotiana for the tobacco hornworms, also outside the garden fence. Lemon balm is a plant I adore, and it does seem determined to take over the entire world, but I just yank, yank, yank out the young seedlings when they pop up where I don't want them. Catnip is the same way.

LCDollar, Worms that bore into the fruit often are tomato fruitworms (same kinds of worms you find in corn). So far, I haven't found any worm holes in tomato fruit yet (knock on wood). I did find a cabbage looper (long and green) on a tomato plant this week, but am not sure if it would have eaten foliage or fruit or if it was just lost and looking for the cabbage, which I've already harvested. I killed it anyway, figuring one less cabbage looper in the world is a good thing.

Yay for the rain. It is irritating to have it wash off something you've just sprayed, but you certainly can not and must not complain about rain falling in a year when far too little of it has fallen. We celebrate every rainfall here, no matter what it messes up. We got far less than you did---only 0.20", but we were thrilled to get that. Any day that rain falls is a good day.

Dawn

Lemon balm is no worse that the other million invasive plants I have :)...including weeds! It is just on my *sigh* list at the moment because it is trying to take over the butterfly garden which is located on top of my old compost pile spot. The whole area has got some nice dirt and it is loving it!

One of my other "not a weed" invasives is purple and green perilla. Very pretty, I think it is even edible...but oh my...it is growing EVERYWHERE. I try to pretend I"m letting it grow as greens for my compost pile...so the bigger, the better, right? :) A quick google tells me the plant belongs in the mint family. That does not surprise me at all!!! It does smell good when I pull it.

Lisa, You and I seem to have the same problem. It is not that we have trouble getting plants to grow---we have trouble keeping certain plants from growing and spreading themselves all over.

The last time I looked at a lemon balm plant and wished it was not in the place where it had popped up and grown, a vole came along ate the roots and all of a sudden, it wasn't there any more. Then it went and found the mother plant from whom all the annoying seedlings had come, and it ate that and suddenly I had no lemon balm.

I think perilla is beautiful, but it is too invasive for me, and I do mostly keep mint contained in large containers. I planted mint in the garden one year, near a spot where bermuda grass creeps under the fence. I wanted to see the mint and bermuda grass slug it out so I could see who won. That first year, the mint won. Then we had tons of rain in 2009, and the mint actually died. It died! I was shocked. I didn't think anything could kill mint and keep it from taking over the whole world.

With very dense clay, there is not much that is invasive here for long. In the places where my most invasive plants, like tansy and four o'clocks grow, we have either that sandy/silty mix at the west end of the garden and beyond or we have a clayey-sandy mix that is not nearly as dense as our worst red clay. So far, the only things that become invasive in the really dense red clay are plants I don't want in the first place---dock, ragweed, Johnson grass, etc.

I do try to tolerate invasive plants as much as possible simply because they do provide a lot of material for the compost pile. You never can have a compost pile that is too big or too well fed.

I just realized why I had so many caterpillars last year. I was putting a bird net over my plants.

Every year, there's a pair of mockingbirds that live in the neighbor's red bud tree, and they were devastating my tomatoes. I've no idea if its the same birds or why there's always a pair of them in that tree, but they just can't wait for my tomatoes to turn red.

But last year, I read Dawn's tip to pick the tomatoes when the first start turning, and I've not used the bird net this year, and caterpillars are not the problem they were last year.

That tip eliminated two problems at once.

Isn't it amazing how a small change can make a huge difference? I'm glad that small tip helped you make a change that has paid off for you.

I keep a birdbath in each garden for the birds, and it also makes a huge difference in birds or squirrels eating tomatoes (or peaches or melons) for the water. Since the birdbaths are a couple of feet above ground, I keep a small flat pan of water filled on the ground in each garden too, and that has significantly reduced tomato damage from turtles. I like having the turtles in the garden, and they eat lots of insects, but they do chomp on tomatoes. After putting flat, shallow pans of water on the ground so the turtles had access to water, I rarely find low-growing tomatoes with huge bites taken out of them any more.

For years we had one mockingbird that was my special garden pal. He literally followed me around all day long and would perch in the exact same spots on each part of the property and would sing his heart out. He was around for 5 or 6 years. He (or she) is gone now, but a new mockingbird has filled that space. This one never messes with tomatoes even if I miss a few and they get red before I find them. Our garden this year is filled with songbirds, particularly cardinals, and I believe they are helping control the grasshoppers. We have billions of grasshoppes and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that. If not for the birds, I think my garden plants would have been nibbled back to the ground (some of them have been) and I wouldn't even have a garden at this point. For all the problems the birds can cause, they still are mostly beneficial. Sometimes you just have to tweak your garden practices a little so your garden can be bird-friendly without the harvest being adversely affected by them.

Dawn