Thursday, October 1, 2009

CREEPY CRITTER ON MY KILLER TOMATO

Remember my killer tomato plant? Several years ago I bought a tomato plant - yellow pear tomato - from Lowe's and planted it in the front flower bed. I have drip irrigation in the front so I thought that would be the best place for it - my job plus 3 hour commute left me with little to NO time for watering plants that weren't on the drip system. Well, that tomato plant was so happy in the front garden it had to be cut back drastically because it was trying to take over the flower bed and the porch ... hence the Killer Tomato nomenclature.
The following year, we had volunteer tomato plants ... I guess a couple of tomatoes must have fallen to the ground and seeded the soil before I removed the big-honkin-mother-plant in the fall. Well, I let one of the volunteers grow and kept it cut back so that it wouldn't take over. Hey -- it's free tomatoes. Then the following year I transplanted yet another volunteer to the newly created back garden. This year the latest round of volunteers is going gangbusters and I have a huge crop of tomatoes. YUM!

Having said all that, I come to the CRITTER part of the story. Today I went out to get some tomatoes for dinner and I saw this HUGE caterpillar walking on the cable system to which the tomatoes are tied. It's really creepy looking and GI-NORMOUS. So I grabbed my camera, took some pictures so I could do some investigating. Isn't he creepy looking?


Per my Google search, he's a Tobacco / Tomato Horn Worm. DUH! Now I notice some of the top leaves are eaten down to the stalk. Okay, I'm waiting till DH gets home to get rid of it 'cause I'm not touching that thing!


ICK!

1 comment:

TexNan said...

I am so jealous of your tomato plants! I get all kinds of volunteers: morning glory, cypress vines. I've even had cantaloupe, but never a single solitary tomato. Dang.

I'm with you on waiting for Bob to rid yourself of the worm that ate Tokyo. Good luck to him.