Assuming they had a horn, you likely found either either tobacco hormworm or tomato hornworm. I see many more tobacco hornworms than tomato hornworms at this end of the state.If you want to kill them, hand-pick them off the plants and squash them, drown them in soapy water, etc.

You can spray your plants with a bioinsecticide containing Bacillus thuringiensis 'kurstaki'. I'll link one such product below so you kind of know what to look for. I usually see it most often in nurseries or farm supply stores, and sometimes in big box stores like Lowe's or Home Depot. This organic insecticide is a bacteria that infects them and causes them to stop feeding shortly after ingestion, and then after that it takes them another day or two to die. Because it will kill all butterflies, only spray it on the plants you want to protect.

The hornworms turn into lovely sphinx moths often referred to as hummingbird moths because of their resemble to hummingbirds. Many people like the moths so don't kill the hornworms. Some of us grow other plants in the solanum family for the caterpillars, so we can remove them from our tomato plants (they also can be found on tomato and tobacco relatives, including ornamental flowering nicotiana, peppers, potatoes, and eggplant) and put them on the plants grown for their eating pleasure.

If you are a gardener whose plants are being attacked by these pests, of course you have the right to kill them. I just chose to relocate them instead. I also plant a lot of companion plants around my tomato plants that are said to repel hornworms, including 4 o'clocks and borage. I don't know if the container plantings are the reason I have relatively little trouble with tomato and tobacco hornworms, but think they probably are. I have grown anywhere from 50 to 600 tomato plants in one year and rarely see any hornworms in my veggies garden at all---maybe 5 to 8 of them total in a bad year, and maybe 0-2 in a good year. I haven't found a tomato or tobacco hornworm yet in my garden this year.

I used to routinely kill them, until our son, who was probably 10 or 11 years old at the time, defended them and asked me why they had to die. He loved watching the moths feeding on night-blooming flowers in the evenings. So, I stopped killed them. Some people like them so much they actually raise them on purpose. (I am not among them.)

If they are doing a lot of damage, I would kill them if I were in your shoes. While it is nice to be able to tolerate them and moved them to other host plants, no gardener should feel obligated to do so. When you have a high number of hornworms relative to the number of plants you have, they can wipe out your tomato crop pretty fast. They are so common here where I live that I often see the hornworms crossing the road while I am out walking the dogs. We have fields full of native solanums, so they don't "have to" come to my garden to eat. It is just that sometimes they choose to do so.

Good luck with them,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Example of a Bt 'kurstaki' Product That Kills Caterpillars

Thanks Dawn.

They did indeed have a horn. I am similar to your son apparently in that I do not like to kill anything. Even snakes and spiders which I do not care for at all, I always just catch them and relocate them.

I wasn't sure what to do with them, but I didn't want to let them stay on the tomatoes. If they did that much damage in one day, I can't imagine what they'd do in a week or more. So I just tossed them over the fence into the empty lot next door. The area that I tossed them on is a small area that has exposed sandstone. So the bermuda is fairly thin in the area.

After tossing them, I got back on the mower and continued. I watched them as I passed nearby to see which way they were crawling. The giant lime green caterpillars were easy to see on the sandstone. And if they were that easy for me to see, apparently they were just as easy for the birds to see.... As I continued to mow I watched several birds come down and take the caterpillars away.

Again, I hate killing things, but this to me was a very acceptable outcome. Good ole mother nature :)

This post was edited by Dulahey on Sat, Jun 29, 13 at 20:35

I tried catch and release with mine... they found my peppers instead that could not take it near as well since they are so small. I picked about 50 off my plants before I finally gave in and went to get the stuff Dawn mentioned. I found it with the brand name Garden Safe at Lowes. I love the moths, and I'm going to plant stuff for them next year, this year I want my tomatoes and peppers. Before I found the caterpillar spray, but after my catch and release didn't work I fed them to the spiders.

Taraleigh

Dulahey, I understand the feeling of not wanting to kill the little wild critters. I grow lots of other things they like, including daturas and flowering nicotine, so that I have plenty of plants to move them too. I love to watch the moths visiting the night-blooming flowers I grow for them. Realistically speaking, though, a garden can only handle them if it has something growing specifically for them . Otherwise they can totally wipe out a veggie garden's tomato, pepper and eggplant crop. My garden is full of birds this year, much more so than usual, and I expect the birds are doing a lot of pest control for me. Because I do not use broad-spectrum pesticides, my garden is full of insects and Arachnids 24/7, but most of them (95-97%) are beneficial insects and I count on them to help control the insects that are pests which damage food crops and ornamentals. I am not saying I am happy to have the 3-5% that do the damage, but just that I am not going to wipe out the whole garden ecosystem in order to kill the pests.

Taraleigh, Fifty is an incredible number to find. That is just amazing....in a bad way. The nice thing about Bt 'kurstaki' is that it only targets butterflies and moths. That also, at the same time, is the worst thing about it because I love having a garden full of butterflies. We are in our 15th year here and I probably haven't used Bt more than 2 or 3 times. Last year, with the climbing cutworm outbreak, was the only time in my life I've ever sprayed my entire garden with Bt and I didn't want to do it, but wouldn't have had any plants left if I hadn't gotten rid of those cutworms. Sometimes you've just got to do something to control pests when you have an extraordinarily high population that is doing damage. I just try to avoid spraying it on flowering plants that the butterflies visit.

We have acreage that mostly has been left in its natural state, so we have oodles of hornworms of other types too, including varieties that feed on wild cherry trees, willow trees, Virginia creeper and trumpet creeper. Last year, one of the ones that eats Virginia creeper came into the house on Tim's shoe. He had been inside for quite a while when I glanced over at him sitting in the recliner and noticed the large hornworm attached to his shoelace. We took it outside and released it.

We have a large pecan tree just west of our big fenced veggie garden. Since it is not fenced off from the wildlife, my attempts to grow ornamental plants there mostly resulted in everything I planted there becoming Deer Chow. I planted four o'clock seeds there about 10 or 11 years ago, and also some daturas. Both thrive in that area and reseed. I am happy about that. The deer almost never eat these plants and the hornworms love to eat the daturas. I read long ago that 4 o'clocks are useful for repelling hornworms from a veggie garden. It seems to work for me.

Dawn

Dawn - It was an amazing amount, they are very good at hiding too. I was okay handpicking them, even with those numbers, it was the other caterpillars actually eating the tomatoes themselves, and the hornworms on my peppers that pushed me over the edge. I only sprayed the tomatoes and peppers, tried to avoid the blooms, and sprayed when there was very little wind to try and minimize the impact on the butterflies I did want. I didn't have any bug problems last year except squash bugs, so it was definitely a new experience. We have 12 acres, but only live on maybe a 1/2 acre of that, the rest is woodland. I plan to add lots of flowers and other plants for the wildlife, we just didn't get to it this year. The land we purchased had an enormous dump pile on it since the land had been vacant for 7 years. It took us a year to get rid of all the trash and the johnson grass. I'm trying to turn that into wildflowers. Much better view than the trash. (and I'm planting 4 o'clocks in tomato beds next year, I'll try anything and I love flowers)

Most of our land is woodland too, and I love it, except that it harbors a lot of wildlife. I enjoy the abundant wildlife for the most part, but some of the critters are not my favorite surprise visitors. This has been a particularly bad skunk year. I'm never happy to see a skunk.

Our first couple of years here, I spent most of my time wandering around with native plant books trying to figure out what was what, and what to keep and what to remove due to its invasiveness.

It has been fascinating (but also sad) watch the woodland and pastures over the years and to see how the native plants ebb and flow. Some plants predominate in wet years, and some in dry years. In average years, they all peacefully co-exist. It has been somewhat disturbing, though, to see how hard the drought years hit even the native plants, which sometimes disappear in a very dry year and don't come back for 3 or 4 years. One of the sadder developments is that our springs stopped running in a drought year and never resumed running, so our spring-fed pond is reverting to a low-lying woodland and our swamp hasn't been swampy since 2010. I hope someday the springs will run again and maybe our pond and swamp will return.

Johnson grass is such a nightmare. I feel like I'll be fighting it for the rest of my life, though in some places I feel like we have almost won the war with it.

I got to see something a couple of days ago that surprised me. I have been having a good supply of wheel bug the past two years Then day before yesterday I watch one take on a horn worm that must have been 8 or 10 times its size. It was not a fair fight, that wheel bug hung by one foot and use the other feet to hold the horn worm. The worm fought hard, but not for long. Those wheel bug are killing machines and it does not seem to hurt their feelings to kill bees.

Yes, they do eat bees. But fortunately, it seems that only a couple individuals zero in on my bees, and I relocate them, killing them if they return to their perch on the hive.

We've only had a very few blister beetles to date. But I was thrilled to find a wheel bug eating one. I told him that he was my friend forever!

We've had a surge in grasshoppers, in spite of treating with semasphore. By tonight, I suspect our beans will be finished... kaput. I've been trying to curb the grasshoppers, but they just keep coming, like I've never in my life seen before. Yesterday they wiped out my soy and started on our carrots. They've eaten the tops off of the onions.

George
Tahlequah, OK