I didn't realize the distinction. I was pretty surprised when I realized mine are the larval form of the sphinx moth. I still kill them though.

I have Tobacco worms. I thought they were tomato worms until I googled!

Tobacco worms will die. If I see any thw I will save them and email you before killing them. :P

Jo

All mine have been Tobacco worms as well. I just figured we didn't have any in Oklahoma.

The majority of mine are usually tobacco hornworms but most every year I'll have a few tomato horn worms. To me they have always been treated the same. I had noticed over the last few days of another hatch feeding on my plants. Harder to find now with all of the foliage. And I couldn't prove it now but I just sent the first tomato horn worm I've seen this year to horn worm heaven an hour ago. Jay

Seriously, if you all have so much floliage and it's dense that you feel like you have to HUNT down the hornworms, it's probably a good time to just start leaving them alone and allow them to remove excess leaves, so the plants will throw more fruits.
Sphinx moths are really seriously declining in Oklahoma, especially the central and south central region. As long as no fruit is harmed and the moths are beneficial, so what if some leaves are stripped.

I still need TOMATO worms!!!!

Glad to hear they are declining, and I don't find them to be beneficials.

Not me, I have like 5 leaves per plant left. Anything eating them will be executed. Unless I find a true tomato hornworm. I'll put that in an envelope to send your way. LOL.

Jo

There's not many, if any, tomato hornworms or hawkmoths at our place this year, but we did have white-lined sphinx moths earlier in the year.

Between the heat and the drought, even the native nightshade plants in the pastures have dried up and died, as have the nicotianas, daturas and brugmansias I grow for the hornworms and moths. I haven't seen a single tomato hornworm on any of my tomato or pepper plants this year. We did have a lot of white-lined sphinx moths visiting the night-blooming flowers in April, May and June but nothing since early July.

If there's any tomato plants still green in our county, then whatever hornworms remain likely are there, but every gardener I know stopped watering in June or July and I haven't seen a green tomato plant anywhere in the county in weeks.

My daughter is currently keeping a tobacco hornworm we found in the garden as a pet. Has had it for a week and a half. Good fun. It's in a big jar, eats a LOT and is as fat as a rat! She takes really good care of that guy.

Taira

Taira,

I originally stopped spraying my tomato plants with Bt 'Kurstaki' to kill the hornworms because our son, who was pretty young at the time, loved the hawkmoths so much. He didn't think it was fair for us to kill them just because we didn't want them eating our tomato plants, and I decided he was right to a certain extent. On the rare occasions I find them in the veggie garden, I usually try to move them to other plants outside the garden so that we can peacefully co-exist.

We plant a lot of plants for both the tomato and tobacco hornworms, and normally have a lot of both kinds of cats and moths all summer long. There's also a lot of native plants here they like, and that helps too. We usually have the caterpillars and moths all over the place, but rarely find them on the tomato plants in the veggie garden. I believe it is because I plant lots of stuff they like to eat outside the veggie garden.

I'm glad your daughter is enjoying her hornworm. I never get tired of watching the hawkmoths and sphinx moths visiting the night-blooming flowers in the evenings. Obviously we wouldn't have the moths if we were out killing all the caterpillars.

Dawn

Thank you, Dawn. Maybe next year. I just hope you have retained at least a few seeds of each of the wide variety of tomatoes, so maybe I can get a few next growing season. Last time you saw me, was last time i grew plants until this summer, and I got here late.

There's something seriously wrong when a normally common insect species is falling off the balance. What else does it indicate? Obviously Soonergrandmom does not have any night-blooming flora. Hawkmoths are even valuable for my Lagenaria gourds!

Dawn this heat and drought are BRUTAL. I've even lost poultry! I cannot wait until winter, so we can regroup. I want to know more about your chickens, too.

By the way, last week, I found a gorgeous Imperial moth on a pine tree trunk. I just left it alone. NE Texas is now invaded with oak wilt. It will run its course and trees that survive, will beget resistant offspring, so clear-cutting is out of the question. The Io's and Poly's will have to find other trees.

I am still just a little jealous over your tomato collection and finding my namesake--tomato worms.

Well the one's I've been killing are the tomato hornworm with the diagonal strips. Just picked a few off of one of my tomato plants. Don't know how I would send them to you tho!

Ok ok I have been convinced to let the worms live. I'm pretty bug friendly, but these guys are brutal to tomatoes. I don't spray I pick them off so relocation could easily work. Next year I'll plant for them, I'll try out some of the plants Dawn mentioned. Thanks for the info. :) I love this forum.

Tomato Hornworm the problem I have is like now I have a small fruit that is exposed to the sun and will be because a horn worm removed all the foliage around it. When I see them elsewhere I leave them alone. When they choose my tomatoes then they have stepped over the line. I had a few plants in cups I watered and let them have. But anything in the ground or in a container is off limits.
Any tomato varieties you want to try that Dawn doesn't have seeds for just send an email. Chances are I might have it. Jay

You all, any spare tomato seeds are welcome this fall. I always grow from seed, but came to this farm so late, starting from seed was not an option. Also the local stores here, only offered Celebrity, a hybrid. I bought 12 plants but normally never grow hybrids.

Normally, I will grow over 300 plants. Here, there's room for twice as many and still tons of other produce. I will have NO shortage of food/habitat for ALL hornworms next summer, so will have even surplus tobacco worms sent to me.

I agree that to much direct sun can harm fruits, but had the impression you were hunting down the cats in tall, dense foliage--just to kill them. I let mine live, but still have to manage my youngest of plants. manage means relocation. There's simply NO shortage of food for them, even if I have to sleeve ground cherries or black nightshades to make them stay there and eat, while being protected from predators and parasitoids.

You are right that I have no night bloomers and I think I have only seen 7 horn worms in the 10 years I have lived here. I don't have a big problem with them, nor do I want one.

Linda, I'm sure I'll have a few extra seeds laying around here somewhere, but I am not disciplined about saving them like Jay is.

I cannot imagine you with only Celebrity plants. I know you love having a nice variety of heirloom plants.

It is a really bad year here for the hornworms---everything is brown and dead in the fields except for the small native persimmons, a few goldenrods, and every now and then I see a green milkweed that is actually still green, though most are brown. There's nothing much here for anything to eat. I'm even feeding the native honeybees because their food options are almost nonexistent.

It has been a struggle this summer to keep anything alive and we have lost a lot of poultry too, some to the heat and some to the raccoons because somebody (not me) left the coop door open one night and the raccoons descended upon the chickens en masse. I was just sick about it, and we spent the next month trapping and removing raccoons or simply removing them without trapping them. Between the heat and the coons, it is a wonder we have any poultry left at all. Most of the weather-related losses came on days when the highs were between 108-113. I've been trying hard to keep them cool in recent weeks, with good success...using sprinklers, misters, 2-liter bottles of ice, fans, a little wading pool, etc. and we've haven't lost any in August, I don't think. July was horrible. We're down to 7 chickens--2 roosters and 5 hens, but have a dozen young chicks, ranging in age from about 3-days-old to two-weeks-old, so if they are make it to adulthood, we'll end the year with roughly the same number of chickens we had when 2011 started. I want to get some more chickens, likely some more Welsummers and some Marans and some guineas, and may get them this fall so they'll be laying size by spring. The chickens are such good company, patrol the yard for insects and their manure and old bedding is great for the compost pile. I get antsy when the size of our flock drops too much.

Everything is so dry and brown here that I look like an un-gardener. We'll have to wait until spring to see what is merely dormant and what has died, but in most past droughts, dormancy ruled and we didn't lose huge numbers of plants. However, both the rainfall deficit and the heat have been so bad this year that I think it is likely we'll see more losses in general, though probably not in the acre around the house I've kept watered reasonably well. And by reasonably well I mean that everything still has some green left to it, but not necessarily that it looks really green or really good--just passable.

Carol, You need something that blooms at night! It is such a pleasure to be outside in the evenings or very early in the mornings and to have the entire yard and garden area perfumed by the sweet aroma of the four o'clocks, nicotianas, daturas, brugmansias and moonflowers. I don't know how many of the brugs will make it through this heat though as they've browned and dropped leaves like mad. The daturas are a little bit tougher. I love seeing the moths flitting around at night too, and I think we have more bat traffic around in the years when we have a lot more nightbloomers.

Dawn

Dawn, it's a CRIME to live-catch and relocate coons. Just shoot them. The turkey vultures need to eat, too. Seriously. They are having a very hard time and unlike coons, they are NOT vermin. Oklahoma simply has too many coons and they are filthy, nasty animals--frought with parasites and rabies!

I still get the willies recalling times I'd go out to service combines and after lifting an access panel or drive shield, a darned coon met me, hissing, growling and snarling. No time to react, and no weapon in hand, i once distracted one with one hand, and as quickly, snatched a hind leg, pulled it down so fast, it could not react, and slammed it against the separator hard enough to stun it. [If you don't knoow any martial arts, don't try that]. I killed it with a hammer. Others have been killed with wrenches, prybars or just ran away before I could get hold of them. I will NOT tolerate raccoons on any combine, period! They just do too much damage.

I've killed 5 since being here. Yes, we lost 6 birds, including some baby turkeys to coons. I hate them worse than squash bugs!

Yes, just Celebrity. I was hoping for some Large Red Cherry or even some Romas, but just Celeb's.

Over the weekend, I got all my belongings down here from storage in Ponca City, including all my great rearing supplies and butterfly/moth screen tents. Yes, I'm loaded for bear. Just need bugs!

As for tomatoes, I'm going to use up lots of old tires for mini raised bed containers. Great use for nearly 100 old tires, too.

What breed/type of chickens do you have? If you can get a nice used GQF "Sportsman" incubator, I have a source for cheap guinea fowl eggs. Can get you some duck and chicken eggs, too. Welsummers are nice, but I recommend American Buckeyes.

Dawn, I do have four-o'clocks and I forgot about those. I have seeds to plant several of the others you mention but it just didn't seem like the summer to try to grow them. We spent very little time outside this year because even at night it was still burning hot. I have had datura in the past, and look forward to planting my brug seeds. I have tried moonflowers once with no luck.

At this stage of my life, I am not an early morning person so I doubt that I would ever be up to enjoy them then. LOL

Tomato Hornworm,
I have to many projects going to search through dense foliage looking for horm worms. If they would live in the dense foliage I would never notice probably. The ones I see are on the top growing tips and have ate several tips off.

I have seeds for most everything I grow. I will send you seeds of some of my favorites this fall. Jay

Linda,

When I said we were trapping and removing them, I never said we weren't shooting them, and I certainly didn't say we were relocating them anywhere else, which only makes them somebody else's problem.

Actually, we trap them right outside the chicken coop most of the time, and sometimes inside the raccoon-proof chicken run which clearly isn't raccoon-proof after all, carry the trap off to a location well away from the house, shoot the raccoon and then remove it from the trap and leave it lying on the ground to feed the buzzards.

If we have a stubbornly smart raccoon around every night who cannot be lured into the trap, we just shoot it right there outside the coop but that's a lot harder to do without shooting a hole in the chicken coop wall. It is a really cute chicken coop with siding and a paint job that matches the house, window boxes of flowers, etc. and I'd like to keep it cute instead of riddled with bullet holes.

We don't like shooting the raccoons close to the coop if we can avoid it because the sound of gunshots makes our chickens simply hysterical. We've also had to shoot some skunks that were out in broad daylight earlier this summer. One of them was shot very close to the chicken coop, and it took that smell forever to go away, so we usually try to avoid shooting them too close to the house or outbuildings as well.

We've fed about 20 coons to the buzzards since late June or early July and maybe 5 or 6 skunks and 1 aggressive possum that tried to attack our adult son. Why it chose to attack instead of playing possum is beyond me. We still haven't eliminated all the raccoons, but we're working on it.

We don't have an incubator and don't really want one. Actually we have an old one out in the barn or attic or somewhere although I have no idea exactly where it is. We're stretched too thin as it is and that would be just one more job on the 'To Do' list, and it all doesn't get 'done' as it is.

We've never had buckeyes, but over the last 15 years or so, we've had just about everything else. Most of our newly hatched chicks are Welsummer or Polish Crested or Mille Fleur d'uccle. We tend to keep the standard chickens and rooster in the big coop and the banties and featherheads in the little coop. There is one little black Japanese banty who adores the Welsummer rooster and follows him around like a puppy follows a child. And, there's one Welsummer who moves into the little coop when she gets broody and helps the Mille Fleur d'uccle hatch the eggs. They sit side by side so close that sometimes it looks like the Welsummer is sitting on the Mille Fleur d'uccle. They take turns going on breaks and do a great job of setting on the eggs and defending the nest.

We're hatching out so many Welsummers that we may not have to buy any this fall. They lay our favorite eggs----I just adore those big brown speckled eggs.

The featherheads and d'unccles are pets more than they are working birds, and the d'unccle rooster thinks he is king of the world. He drives me crazy with his aggressiveness and I call him by a very unflattering name because he irritates me so.

Carol, I agree it wasn't the year to try a lot of new stuff from seed. I have oodles and oodles of flower and herb seeds (and some veggies too) that I had intended to plant, but didn't because the winter/spring drought was so severe and the prospects for summer improvement didn't look any better. I'm glad now that I didn't waste those seeds by planting them. Hopefully the 2012 planting/growing season will be better. I think that is a lot more likely for those of you in the northern half of OK than for those of us in the southern half.

On the other hand, I don't see how 2012 could be any worse for us than 2011. For the last 365 days, southcentral OK is drier than it has been in any other 365-day period on record, so you gotta figure it will turn around and start getting better soon. It has to! Today is our 63rd day at or over 100 degrees and our 93rd day at or above 90 degrees. I am so ready for a change in the weather. For us, just a day in the low- to mid-90s would be a big improvement. Right now it is 107 at Burneyville and reached 107 on our porch earlier though it has since dropped cooler than that.

Jay, I know you're busy, but it is Hatch chile pepper time! Got any Hatch chiles yet? We bought some this week.

Dawn

I "relocated" 5 raccoons on Saturday. I moved them from some trees into a small pile on the ground. Lots of raccoons this year and a few possum, but just one skunk.

No young turkeys that I have seen for the 3rd year in a row which is why I "relocate" the raccoons.

I had a second round of hornworms about 10 days ago but left them on the plants. I didn't look close enough to see the type, but I know most, if not all that I see are tobacco hornworms.

Dawn,
I got to stay here at my old location all week and that is sure nice. I get home a lot earlier. They have changed their minds about the cooler weather and now saying Sunday and maybe Monday before we will see it.

I have some NM chile types that are sure loading up. Some are ready to pick. I've picked a few that were sunburned ect. With the leaf canopy they have this year I was a little surprised to see the sunburn issues. I have some that are getting rather large. May start picking a few more. My Hungarian Volcano plants are sure loaded up and I've been picking a few for sandwiches and also to roast. The best setting NM chile varieties so far are the ones from the CO grower and a couple of varieties from the NM reservations. They have loved the heat. Jay

Dawn,
Kudos to you! [giving you a virtual high five!] I LOVE turkey vultures and by deliberately feeding them here here, on location, it's like having another kind of bird feeder! YAY!

Yessss on the Welsummers!!!! I want to buy as many eggs as you can spare next spring or whenever they begin laying again. Too hot to lay I think now, but days will also shorten as it cools. Unless you provide some electric light, they will not lay til spring.

Who's Jay? Does he like to grow a nice variety of peppers? I like peppers and of course the hornworms do too. Be sure to tell him about me. Maybe I can get a few seeds of each for SASE's.

Oh, I dug up my tobacco worm pupae last night. 4 of them had crashed, but that's nature. I have 9 healthy, wiggly ones. That's exactly a 50 percent survival from the tiny larvae found. Only one was about 2.5 inches. Rest were 2" and under. Half were under 1", with the tiniest being just hatched and sitting by its empy egg shell. Shoot, for such care given to them, it's like rearing birds from the egg or baby chicks sent in. I beat nature's odds by a huge margin, by indoor rearing!!!

It is totally awesome to realize the big, full-fed, 5/8" x 4.4" caterpillar began life as a 1/32" x 3/16" critter hatched from an egg the size of a standard straight pin head!

Linda,
I'm Jay. As Carol says I sleep with one leg on each side of the state line in extreme SW KS. I grow a wide variety of veggies in a deep sandy loam soil. Haven't found anything I can grow here. I garden in the middle of an oasis. LOL. We are over half way through year four of a severe drought. I will post some pictures of my garden 2 weeks ago and try to take some more soon. The plants have been jumping lately. Was getting some fruit set till the heat set back in. Hopefully it will moderate soon.

Two of my favorite veggies are tomatoes and NM chile types. I grow a wide variety of tomatoes and several of the NM chile types. Some from NMSU and several heirloom/op's from Indian Reservations,Mexico and growers I've received seeds from. I also grow several jalpenos and a few bells. Just like with my tomato seeds. I'll be glad to send you some. I also grow one called Hungarian Volcano that is very good. Has some heat but not unbearable. Heavy production and great flavor. I don't bag blooms. So far knock on wood I haven't had any trouble with crosses. I don't ask for anything in return, don't ask for SASE. Just patience if I'm slow getting the seeds packed and sent. If you see anything I have please just send an email and ask. Otherwise I will send you some of my favorites. I grow a NM chile type selection made by a breeder/grower in CO that has done very well here.

In the link I attached some of the plants are small especially some of the container plants. That is because I transplanted them late on purpose. My intent is to have fruit set starting when I move them into my lean to before the first frost and to keep them going till December if possible.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pictures

It should of said "I haven't found anything I can't grow here" in the above post.

Carol when you have time look at the link of my pictures and the one of the area around my garden. Then you will know why my plants never get the greener on the other side of the fence thought. All I have to do is threaten them with relocation to that area. LOL. Jay

Scott,

We're seeing very few wild turkeys too, compared to how many we were seeing 5 or 10 years ago. I always thought raccoons were cute, until I learned what vicious poultry killers they are. They also can decimate a corn patch in one night, so there's no place for them here at our place.

We're overrun with whitetail deer because we've been feeding them since mid-June, but so far no deer predators have shown up as far as I know, which is a good thing. In fact, I don't think I've seen a fox, bobcat or coyote (or any other 4-legged large predators) on our property in recent months, although we still hear the howl of a distant coyote every now and then. I'm not missing the predators at all though. It has been bad enough to have to battle the raccoons all summer long. I've never seen as many as we've had here this year. Since we've mostly eradicated them, I don't have to worry about the pet cats or chickens as much when the wild carnivores aren't stopping by. It sure does take a lot of work to eradicate the coons though because every time you think you've removed every single one of them, more show up. I suppose we'll never get rid of them, but at least we can try to keep their numbers down up here around the house and outbuildings.

I've been out to oodles of wildfires in July and August and one thing the firefighters have said to me repeatedly is that they are seeing precious little wildlife of any sort whatsoever, which I've noticed as well. Usually we see quite a few wild things fleeing the flames, but this year they aren't there. I have seen exactly one cottontail rabbit at one fire and nothing at all at any of the others. I wonder how long it will take for the wildlife levels to return to normal after this long, horrible drought finally ends? We've also had numerous fish kills in the Red River, the lakes and even farm ponds. Talk about a stinky mess! This summer is so hard on all the little wild things.

Jay, I bet it has been great to be closer to home and to get to be out in the garden in the daylight hours. Your garden photos look great, as always!

"They" keep sticking a cool day out in the forecast maybe 6 or 8 days away (with cool being any day with a high temp less than 100) and then as that magical cool day draws near, it turns into a day with a forecast high of 104 or 106 or 108. I think they are toying with us. Now they're saying we'll get a break mid-week of next week. We'll see if it really happens. Today is our 64th day with a high temp at or above 100 and our 94th day with a high temp at or above 90 degrees. It has been ridiculous. Everyone keeps saying we'll never see a summer like this again. I certainly hope that's true. I'm worried your 4-year drought might have moved down here to visit us. If that is true, you can have it back whenever you want. : )

Linda, All our chickens lay eggs pretty much all winter. Their coops have windows for some natural light and we usually leave a light on for them all night on cold nights. Of course, egg production stops when they're molting, but that's just a temporary thing and they all don't molt at the same time, so someone is usually laying eggs at any given time. I don't know if I'll have any extra Welsummer eggs ext year because I want to hatch some of them and we eat all we can. We started out with only 6 Welsummers, and the raccoons got three, so then we were down to three. Now we have those three and the chicks they've hatched. I think 5 or 6 of our dozen newly hatched chicks are Welsummers, so at least we can start building up the Welsummer population again. Our entire poultry flock has shrank continually since 2008 because of heavy predation, so we're slowly rebuilding it, and working on elminating the predators. One of our neighbors trapped bobcats all summer long the last 2 summers, and that has helped a lot. Before he started trapping them, he was losing about 100 chickens a year to them. Since we are surrounded by wild river bottom land, we'll always have predator issues though.

Jay is our Tomato King and our Pepper King as well and is an all-around good guy.

Dawn

Nice to meet you, Jay. So tell me...just WHERE in SW Kansas are you? I used to live not far from you, in a relative sense. One farm southwest of Hugoton and other locations througout Kansas. Give me an opportunity to move back, settle again on a field crop farm, with lots of wheat, milo and maybe some irr. corn, and I will fly again.
Just let me know if you you end up with seeds for diff peppers, maters and anything else you'd like to get rid of for SASE.

Jay, keep watching for any hornworms and please do NOT kill/harm a single one of them! Now that I know where you are, you need every last one of them [except true tomato worms] because you are frought with puncturevine [aka goathead stickers]. For some reason, a particular phytochemical in them, nourishes the normally nightshade-only eating hornworms. Get enough of them going, and you can have a degree of biological control in tight places about your garden where herbicides are not an option! The more the cats feed on puncturevine, the more the moths will be imprinted to oviposit on them as well.

Dawn, I highly recommend investing in at least 2-3 bantam hens. Cochins, Plymouth Rocks, Silkies are among some favorites and will be the better setters, even among banties. This is so you don't tie up any precious Welsummer hens for the incubation period, as they will quit laying. You can have both eggflow and babies with surrugate hens.

Now all I need, is some good WINTER-killed bobcats from your neighbor, so I can get at least one to mount.

Linda I live on the north edge of Elkhart. My Mother was raised one mile north of the Cimmaron River straight north of Rolla and then 1 mile west. My youngest sister still teaches at Rolla. My Uncle was the principal and head football coach there for many years and my aunt taught there and a cousin still does. My boy and my oldest nephew both went to Rolla. I was born in NM and lived on ranches till we moved to Elkhart in 1966. Have been here since.

I should have plenty of extra seeds. Getting some fruit set now. Wish it would cool off like they keep saying. They have backed off on the cooldown till Monday. I sprayed a bloom maker last weekend in preparation for the upper 80 temps they were predicting starting Wed and they haven't got here yet. My peppers are enjoying it though. Jay

Linda,

We have two banty hens and a banty rooster, and a handful of tiny and adorable banty chicks, ranging in age from 1 to 2 weeks of age. I hope they're mostly hens and not cockerels (I know the odds) because the little banty d'uccle rooster we have is the most vain, egotistical jerk of a rooster we've ever had, and that's saying a lot. He drives me insane, and the last thing I want is another one just like him.

We also have a broody Welsummer who will set on any egg she spots, including plastic Easter Eggs. It is her nature to set on eggs and you can tell it is her mission in life to hatch out chicks, so we let her do it. She and the little Mille Fleur d'uccle make a great tag team when it comes to hatching out eggs. I hope to raise enough Welsummers that it won't matter if one or two of them get broody and stay on the nest awhile. We raise the eggs and chickens for our own enjoyment, so I'm not trying to set any egg-laying records. Of course, we have a long waiting list of friends who love it when we have extra eggs to give away, but since we're hatching out the eggs that we can in order to rebuild our flock after the predation and heat-related deaths, none of our good buddies have gotten any eggs from us in a while. They understand the absence of eggs though because they're ranchers, so they're struggling to keep as much of their herds intact as possible in this horrid extended drought. The sale barns are busy, busy, busy as everyone culls cattle. Even folks we know with horses are downsizing. Feed and hay are just too costly. At least hens are fairly self-sustaining as long as there's lots of bugs around and ours have had all the grasshoppers they can eat all summer long with plenty of hoppers to spare.

With so little moisture, it is looking like a winter wheat crop may be iffy here, but everyone is plowing and getting their soil ready so they can sow seed if a rainy spell seems like a sure thing. We haven't had a sure-thing rainy spell in ages, just an occasional hit or miss shower that drops a tenth of an inch or so once every couple of weeks. It certainly isn't enough to get winter wheat started or to keep it growing, but the drought has to break eventually, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Our neighbor effectively wiped out the local bobcats with heavy trapping for two straight years. If they are still around, none of us have seen them. I know he hasn't mentioned losing a single chicken to a bobcat this year, and he doesn't have raccoon issues like we do because he doesn't have multiple creeks running through his property----he's got flat, grassy pasture land, not creek hollow or river bottom land. It's been wonderful to walk out into the yard this year and not see a bobcat sitting on top of the chicken coop trying to find a way inside.

It is so hot and dry here that much of the wildlife either didn't give birth this year or abandoned their young because they couldn't feed them. The numbers of wild things are way, way down here.

Even the feral pigs are lying low in this incredible heat and everyone who has to deal with them is enjoying having a break from their destruction. Maybe the exceptional drought in Texas and Oklahoma will set back their out-of-control population.

Jay,

Yesterday we still had a cooldown in our forecast for midweek of next week....only cooling down to 97 and 93, but any cooldown would be appreciated. During the middle of the day they took away the two cooldown days, then last night they put them back. Then....

This morning? Our 97 and 93 were replaced with something like 103 and 101, so someone has misplaced our cooldown one more time.

Why do they keep teasing y'all and us with a cooldown that doesn't come? They are torturing us by getting our hopes up needlessly over and over again. I will say that the nights are getting cooler though, and that's nice. We'll take whatever improvement we can get.

Hummingbirds are migrating south and I usually see hornworms around the same time as the migration. I'm seeing increasing numbers of hummers daily, but not a single hornworm.

Dawn

Jay, I used to visit a friend in Rolla when I lived by Moscow. Not that far of a drive, by west Kansas standards. Shoot, I was 3 miles to my closest neighbor! Been through Elkhart a couple of time, while living there, but the most memorable, were stops near there and visiting a restaurant or two, during some of my wheat runs from years ago. I miss harvesting, too!

Linda,
I know most everyone in Rolla and related to a few of them. I'm not saying they would claim me. LOL. Know several people in Moscow. My youngest sister and her husband farm and ranch 22 miles SE of Elkhart and she teaches in Rolla.

Jay, I sent you an e-mail.

Linda,
Please try again as I haven't received one yet. Jay

Ok, so why do some people want these horrible worms?

Sorry Jay. I guess this forum's e-mail service does NOT work. Explains why Dawn never received MY first e-mail, nor did others. I had to send her one, when I got her's.

Send me one to sun_dog63[at]yahoo.com and I should get it, then I can send you another, similar to what I said before.

May be a bit off here but, are you wanting people to keep the worms and give them to you? If so I have picked a few off the tomatoes and peppers today. I live in central ok and would be happy to keep them if you are nearby.

Logan, if you still have those caterpillars, please find an alternate host plant for them. They are increasingly rare in central oklahoma. If you have any weeds in the nighshade family or have puncturevine or goathead stickers, relocate the cats to those plants. Tobacco hornworms love puncturevine and by orienting them to this grossly noxious weed, the resulting moths wil be more likely to be imprinted to the plant, too. Biological control!

blackthumb, They want them because they turn into beautiful moths.

Linda,
I sent you a message and haven't heard if you received it or not. I checked all my spam email and never found anything in it. Jay

Blackthumb, they are NOT "horrible." They are very pretty and they feed on any nightshades and one very nasty weed, too.
The moths are not colorful, but are still very cool and beneficial to night-bloomers.

Last year I had a two foot tomato plant that I had raised and babied from seed, and carefully hardened off. The day after I planted it, I walked out and it was stems only, and then I saw the buggars! It's like post traumatic stress disorder! Whenever I see one I freak out!

Next year, plant TEN tomato plants from seed.

I do all mine from seed because I simply could not afford to buy 300+ plants.

Is anyone still looking for these hornworms? I just pulled 6 of them off my tomato plant. Looking from the top of their backs..it is a white V shape so it may be the one youre looking for. I hate to kill them if someone is actually looking for them. Feel free to email me at Missrverrat@gmail.com if anyone wants these sent to them. Thanks

TomatoWorm59 I wish you live near me! my garden is infested with them! they really creep me out