One of the worst things any gardening for beginners can face is garden pests. While there are, many and they can vary depending on your crops.
One of the most dreaded is the tomato hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata). You can find this pest can wreak havoc on tomatoes or other crops in the Nightshade (Salicaceae) family and can include peppers and eggplants.
For new gardeners, you can see two similar types. The tomato hornworm and the Tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta), and these are often confused with each other.
Here you can learn more about the green caterpillar on tomatoes, the life cycle, and how you deal with them. Just be sure you use vinyl-potting benches, you don’t want these worms to mistake it for food.
What Does a Tomato Worm Turn Into?
It is good to understand the difference between the two. The green tomato worm (Manduca quinquemaculata) will be the most enormous caterpillar you may ever see. Most often green in color, they can reach up to 3 or 4 inches in length.
Along its sides, they have white V-shaped marks. To the rear of the caterpillar is a black horn.
Once you begin to look at a tobacco hornworm, you see they have diagonal white markings and a red horn rather than black. A tomato hornworm will finally turn into a five-spotted hawk or Sphinx moth.
How Many Eggs Does a Tomato Hornworm Moth Lay?
It’s not the worm laying the eggs it’s; the adult moth. She will lay eggs at night on the leaves, and most often, on the underside. Each moth can lay from one to five eggs each time she visits a pant, and in total, she can end up laying around 2,000 eggs.
You will find the first generation of the hornworm larvae will be seen in late May or June. Once they have fed for three weeks, the larvae burrow in your soil and pupate.
From early August to early October, you can see the first generation of adults, and the second generation of the tomato hornworm pupa.
How Fast Do Tomato Hornworms Grow?
The hornworms breeding starts with the adults in late spring. You see the small green spheres, which are their eggs.
It takes around 6 to 8 days for the eggs to hatch, and then the development stage begins, and this can last up to four weeks. It is here they feed relentlessly on your plants.
At the end of the growing season, they burrow underground and are in the pupal stage over the winter. Then, these begin to emerge in June or July of the following year as adults.
Ridding your garden of these hornworms can be as they are growing, or as they are sleeping.
How Do You Get Rid of Tomato Worms?
You can find that if you have a significant infestation, it takes a few days for them to ravage your garden. Where they start on your leaves, they can move onto the fruits in the latter part of the season.
You can find many commercial products to ride these caterpillars from your plants, or you can take approaches that are more natural. Many gardeners use something substantial such as a boulder, to squash them.
You can also apply BT (Bacillus Thuringiensis), which is a bacterium you find in the soil. However, adding more ups the dose the tomato and tobacco hornworms ingest. As soon as they consume enough, their digestive systems are paralyzed, so they can’t feed, and they die.
BT is safe for humans and pets, and it just deals with the tomato hornworm with the V-shaped markings and the tobacco hornworm. BT is sufficient if the larvae are small.
Another option can be tilling your soil (spring before planting or late fall) with a Roto-tilling machine as this can disrupt the lifecycle of the worm and kill them off.
What many gardeners see are hornworms covered in small white egg sacs. Some think these are offspring of the worm, yet these are eggs from the braconid wasp.
Braconid wasps are a beneficial insect as these also paralyze the caterpillars. Luckily, this kind of wasp isn’t a threat to humans, so let their numbers accumulate, and you can be nearly tomato hornworm free without doing anything.
One other option is to spray a mix of liquid dishwashing and water onto the plant foliage, followed by a dash of cayenne pepper. If it rains, you need to repeat application.
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Please include a photo of the moth the hornworm becomes.
I, like very few I have read, am raising my tomato worms. My tomato is done giving us fruit and I have never seen the moth that is the final product.
I read that after the worm stage, they burrow into the ground where they stay until next year. They are missing this morning. Would they have burrowed in the ground in the pot that the tomato was in or do they wander off into a larger area to burrow? Any help would be greatly appreciated.