Attack of the Green Tomato Hornworm

I often leave for work before the sun rises.  This means that I often water the garden before the sun comes up, so I occasionally miss a pest problem in the early stages.  This week was no exception.  I went outside to pick the first of the beefsteak tomatoes and a handful of cherry tomatoes and found that both plants had been decimated by a hungry critter.  As I reached down to look at the half of a tomato dangling from the vine I saw a huge caterpillar.  I'm talking about a 4-inch long green behemoth as thick as my thumb clinging to the stem below the fruit.  Green Tomato Hornworm.  After further inspection I found at least one more, and a few other tomatoes that were likely harboring smaller versions of the buggers.  I removed the worms and the infected fruit by hand and fed the worms to some hungry birds.

The tomato in the back of the picture has been hollowed out, and contains a fat green worm.
A bird swooped down and nabbed the four inch long big greeny in front while I was working in another part of the yard so they must be tasty to the right customer.  I did some research and supposedly hot pepper and dish soap in water will keep these guys at bay, so I'm mixing up a batch and will return to my plant with spray bottle in hand this evening.

Update: I routinely sprayed my tomatoes every two to three days with the hot pepper-garlic-soap mixture all season, and wound up not getting to eat a single tomato the whole season. Everyone was infested with hornworms and hollowed out before it ripened.  I probably threw out 50 cherry tomatoes and 15 massive beefsteaks.  I'm still looking for a non-toxic solution for pest control on tomatoes, but won't waste my time with the hot pepper soap mixture again.

The suprises keep on coming

How is yardwork like scientific research? Sometimes you set out to accomplish one goal, and find something new and amazing in an area you expected to be mundane.

After months of intentional neglect and lack of watering we have successfully killed off the white clover infestation in the backyard. The plan for this weekend was to till the backyard, remove the cheesy pink scalloped stone border, add some curves with a new border, and re-seed the grass. Ambitious for two people? Yes, but was a long weekend.

Soon after we started tilling the soil we realized that the ivy and shrubbery along the back fence had snuck out into the yard about 3 feet while we weren't looking. We set to work pulling ivy, and trimming back the hedges. We filled up both of our green waste bins in about an hour and made it about halfway across the yard.

In the center of the back wall were a massive bush, a small palm, and a large agave. The palm and the agave had been strangled by the ivy and were mostly dead, so they both came out. We began pulling the ivy out of the bush, and discovered that the bush was not a bush at all. It was just a vine draped over an 8 foot tall metal arch. That's right, we had an 8 foot tall metal arch along our back wall, and it took us 6 months to find it. In the center of the arch was a large jade plant which we also didn't know existed. During the two years of neglect (a year an a half as an empty house and the 6 months since we moved in), the vine spread and grew so that the arch was completely hidden. We now plan on keeping the arch where it is and using it to support some fruiting vines and are rethinking how we are going to set up the rest of the yard.