Tomato Bugs
Facts About Tomato Bugs
Tomato bugs, or hornworms, are merely the larval stage of the sphinx moth, and are about a veracious a pest as one could hope to extinguish from their garden. If you have noticed tomato bugs, or rather the horrible shreds that they leave behind as a memento, there are a few things that you can do to control future invasions and further frustrations. There are few bugs who can strip an entire, mature plant down to its skeletal stems, single handedly within twenty-four hours. Tomato bugs can, and they will, and they are going to unless you arm yourself with some very important preventative facts.
There are pesticides which work wonders against tomato bugs, and better yet their eggs. Preventing these starving pests from ever getting their gluttonous mouthparts into those juicy leaves is a great first step. If you are like the millions of other Americans who have decided to go green and organic, you should be prepared to spend a whole lot of time in your garden checking on the health of your plants. This is why organically grown produce costs so much more than does the run of the mill sort. There are hundreds of man hours spent on just this type of maintenance and pest control. Perhaps you will appreciate these efforts a bit more by the time the season for tomato bugs has passed.
For proper inspection, you must check the undersides and stalks of each leaf on each plant individually. Seeing a sphinx moth or two will definitely tip you off that there may be games afoot within your garden, and frequent inspection will be your best defense. Tomato bugs start out quite small and skinny, at approximately ¼ inch in length. Depending on how freely he is allowed to feed and on the nutritional contents of the plants, he can reach his full pupae stage of 1 ½ inches long and up to ¼ inch thick within four days. He also defecates about twice per hour, and you are sure to see clear signs of these droppings alongside the nibble and munch spots he greedily creates.
There are a few natural enemies known to tomato bugs, and their presence can most certainly be of help. Some, however, just happen along too late and take a little bit too long to debilitate the garden ravaging pest. There is a parasitic wasp, for instance, which burrows into the tomato bug and devours it alive. Tomato bugs can survive this attack for up to four days, however, and by this time the damage has been well documented and his death to no avail for you. If you do find tomato bugs in your garden, collect them in a deep glass jar, so that they can’t escape very easily, and apply pesticide directly to them once you have left the garden.