We have had a garden for as long as we have been married and every year we make a couple changes to improve our efficiency. At the beginning of 2019, prior to ever even thinking about this whole homesteading idea, I decided I wanted to double our garden. Even now, I am not sure what I was thinking because we were not prepared for what the summer had in store for us. In April, we planted and planted and planted some more…honestly, I didn’t think we would ever get the garden completed.
In May, our garden was chugging along. Blooms were appearing on many of our plants and we decided to take a much needed weekend to go to see my husband’s parents. We were only gone a couple of days, but when we returned our beautiful tomato plants looked decimated. We had no idea that we had monsters in our midst. For several days after returning home, we looked at our destroyed tomato plants trying to understand what had happened. I had just turned in my notice at work and knew as soon as I was at home full time I would have to set my sights on correcting the tomato problem.
It was not until almost a week after our mini vacation that I discovered the tomato problem was staring us right in the eye.
Tomato horn worms (or in some cases tobacco horn worms) had infiltrated and attempted to annihilate our garden. They were everywhere! When I first discovered them, it was because one had reared its head up at me, attempting to scare me away I think. It was almost 4-5 inches long, that is a huge worm, had what appeared to be a mouthful of teeth, and this little red horn off it’s backside. I had no idea if it could bite or sting and to make matters worse it appeared to be spitting green juice at me.
We had decided early on that we were not going to use any kind of pesticide or insecticide outside of soap and salt. Our plan had been from the beginning to grow everything as naturally as possible and even with these giant green monsters in play, we wanted to stick to our plan. Therefore, after a little more research, I found out that they were relatively harmless, to humans that is, and so our mission was to find each and every horn worm, pull it off the tomato plant and “smush” it.
The first week, we found hundreds of these creatures. Thankfully, the ant army would follow close behind us after we completed that day’s de-worming and they would take all the worm bodies away. As the weeks went on, we saw a decrease in the number of horn worms and our tomatoes were able to recover.
Just when I thought the worst of it was behind us I started to see a new variation of the monster I had fought all summer.
Initially, I thought it must be a mother horn worm, carrying all her babies and so I started removing these from my plants as well. I found myself intrigued though by this new monster as I continued to find more and more of them on my plants and so I sat down once again to do research.
The white larvae on the horn worm turned out not to be baby horn worms, but actually baby wasp; the braconid wasp. These wasp babies, were actually feeding on the horn worm from the inside out, eventually leading to the horn worm’s demise. Hello circle of life (cue the lion king please). I mean, you almost feel bad for the horn worm, he has baby wasps everywhere on him. Furthermore, I found out that once the baby wasps are full size they actually eat the horn worms. Winning!!
So while I continue to fight what feels like a never ending battle against the tomato monster, it is good to know that we have wasp allies on our side, fighting with us. It is always an adventure on the farm.