Brooke and I were outside trying to avert the catastrophe that is our tomatoes when Brooke found this thing eating one:
And just to give you more of an idea of how big the thing was, we grabbed a shot of it next to (ish) Brooke’s hand:
Brooke noted that there was a tomato nearby that looked like the evil caterpillar had taken a few bites, but there wasn’t much damage done. However, considering the size of the thing, you have to wonder if it ate a few whole tomatoes before we got outside and found it.
Anyway, there are apparently giant caterpillar monsters in our garden. Watch for the SyFy Saturday Night Movie on the subject in the coming months.
I think that’s a luna moth caterpillar.
Handpick them off and put in soapy water. Bummer. I think it’s been too hot here for so many bugs. My tomatoes are doing the best out of everything!
A tobacco worm. I can remember mom having me help her find them on her tomatoes, which they seem to LOVE! But they’re really hard to spot. If you have tomatoes you seem to always get tobacco worms. You have to pick them off and KILL them!! Sorry 🙁
yeah, that thing was NOT going to come off, so i just snapped the branch off and threw it over the fence. also, just be clear, the tomatoes are an impending catastrophe because they’re doing so well they keep shadowing the things planted around them and we have to keep trying to tie them up. not a problem i thought we’d being having, but oh well!
so the worm was bigger than your thumb — but the tomatoes are bigger than you are! nice!
I just read Aldo Leopold’s, “A Sand County Almanac.”
This reminds me of the book.
I would recommend it to you guys as hobby farmers, and also tell you that he would have you thank the prairie that was there for thousands of years for your wonderful tomatoes.