It’s hard to believe that this fat green ugly caterpillar could turn into a moth one day!
First one I’ve seen in the garden, or anywhere else, all year long and it was a big one!
I ripped off the whole cluster of cherry tomatoes so you could see how big it was. The cherry tomatoes are in a quart-sized container.
You can see it ate the end of the stem, the last tomato and half of the next fruit.
By the way those Sungold Cherry Tomatoes are delicious!
This particular “worm” might have become bird food. I took the piece of stem with the big bugger still hanging on it and tossed it down the gravel lane.
Now we’re on the lookout for missing leaves. Seeing a whole leaf gone or leaves and stems missing is a sure fire way to tell that tomato worms are in the tomato patch.
Oh, if you see one with a bunch of white cottony oval eggs on it, leave it hang. Those eggs are from predatory wasps that keep the tomato worm numbers in check.
Leave it to nature!
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, by David L. Wagner, states that many trees are their common foodplants, like “ash, buttonbush, cherry, horse sugar, lilac, magnolia, sassafras, silver bells, spicebush, sweet bay, sweet gum, and tulip tree.”