SVB and Tomato Horn Worms..

16 years ago

I have found both squash vine borer moth and tomato horn worm moths in my vegetable garden. Last year, they killed my pumpkins, zucchini, and ate almost all leaves off my tomato plants. This year, I want to win the battle.

I have been using row covers every night, and when the plants were young, I kept the covers on all day too. Now that they are flowering, I keep the covers off during the day.

I have found SVB eggs, and removed a few. I have sprayed with neem oil to hopefully kill the ones I don't see.

What else can I do to protect my crop?

The neem oil spray bottle says to apply weekly or after rain. Will it kill the bees too? I have been trying to spray the foliage and avoid the flowers. How careful do I have to be and how much neem oil is enough to stop these pests?

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Comments (7)

Violet_Z6
16 years ago
Squash Vine Borer Control

Tomato Hornworm Control

Pest management is complex, if you want to learn, a good place to start is here:

Integrated Pest Management
This lecture is presented in two parts. Each part is 90-minutes in length. Recorded in Sacramento County in California's Sacramento Valley, this lecture is by Mary Louise Flint, Ph.D., Director, IPM Education and Publications, UC Statewide IPM Project and Extension Entomologist & Cooperative Extension Specialist.

Education:
B.S. Plant Science, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Entomology, University of California, Berkeley

Appointment:
100% Cooperative Extension

Research Interests:
Integrated pest management of landscape, agricultural and garden pests; biological control of arthropod pests; alternatives to pesticides; adoption of alternative practices by practitioners; innovative delivery of pest management information.

Topics discussed in the Integrated Pest Management Lecture:

* IPM references and resources
* Preventing pest problems
* Natural common enemies
* Making less toxic pesticide choices
* Controlling aphids, scales, caterpillars, coddling moths, tree borers, snails and slugs, and lawn insects.

You can watch the programs now online:

Just make sure you have Real Player installed or download it free.

Integrated Pest Management Part 1 90 minutes

Integrated Pest Management Part 2 90 minutes

You'll want to bookmark the following link to Professor Flint's Lab Research on:
Controlling Pests in Gardens and Landscapes: Vegetables and Melons

I promise you'll learn one or two things to put in your gardening bag of pest management arsenals.

;)
korney19
16 years ago
Switch to something stronger than neem?

If you went as far as using row covers, perhaps I would have removed them only to hand pollinate the flowers and then immediately recover. Also, there's a chance you can get SVB from the ground if you had them in the past and you planted in the same spot, regardless of row covers.

I think now that you've removed the covers, without using stronger pesticides, I'd manually & very thoroughly inspect the vines for eggs every 2-3 days. This may be too much work & very hard to do. And I don't think neem will last more than a few days anyway, and yes, I believe it will kill bees too, according to kubota's post recently of a neem label warning.

Personally, I've tried many methods and things against SVB's and the best I've found against them are man-made pesticides, some considered "heavy duty." If you don't want to try chemicals against SVB's, then maybe consider not growing members of the cucurbit family, or at least expect heavy losses.

As for hornworms, I coincidentally haven't had any in about 5 years or so since I planted Datura and Borage in the garden.

P.S. Does the label for your neem product specifically say it works against SVB's? I've even found manmade pesticides labeled for SVB's that aren't effective.

Mark
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Your tomato/tobacco hornworm will eat the leaves of tomato, preferrably, though they can be found on other members of the Solanaceae family such as pepper and potato, though grudgingly. There are a few native weeds in this plant family, but you would have to look them up since I don't know where you live. Most of those plants are considered toxic....Solanaceae is the Nightshade family. That's pretty much it. They are not generalists but very host specific. The lids of water are useless. Spray the leaves occasionally with water. Captive caterpillars often succumb to disease if in the hands of someone who has not learned the rudiments of caring for them. That would be most of us! To go along with your philosophy, releasing them into the 'wild' without an appropriate food source would be cruel. They would suffer a slow death of starvation. I suggest that you either sacrifice your own tomato plant, or get some more tomato plants, or serve them up to the birds in your garden by placing them in the bird bath or feeder. That would be a good thing to do, right? In nature, there are many pests and parasites that help control these particular caterpillars. Very few of the many that are hatched actually make it to adulthood.
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anney
16 years ago
korney

Datura, the angel trumpet-flower?
korney19
16 years ago
Yes, mine were white, Datura metel I believe, from Pinetree Garden Seeds (www.superseeds.com) and some from ebay about 5 years ago. I've also grown the double purple ones but they never [re]self-seeded for me here.

{{gwi:87108}}

They usually bloom in the evening, and coincidentally, the sphinx & hawk moths (hornworm adults) fly at night...

Surprisingly, I've never seen hornworms on Datura...

I've just pulled a few in my pumpkin patch area, they were getting too big... the soil in that area grows them as tall as 5ft and as wide as 6ft with 2"+ diameter stems. I think normal is more like 2-3ft and stems under an inch.
anney
16 years ago
The trumpets are beautiful. Do you believe the borage is repelling the tomato hornworms? (I'm planning to plant some among my tomato plants next spring.) The hornworms are supposed to really like datura plants.
korney19
16 years ago
Can't say if one or the other or both combined. I use some heavy duty stuff on my pumpkins but rarely if at all spray the tomatoes, except for Daconil regularly (though not yet this year, I'm a little behind schedule.) Still have lots of bees (bumble, blue, honey, carpenter, leafcutter, etc, plus wasps) and dragonflies, hoverflies, halictids, etc, plus I'm right in the middle of a city--some of the wildlife you wouldn't expect. Also have lots of Bee Balm & Lemon Balm & Walking onions, and this year lots of garlic.

I wouldn't really consider myself "organic," I use lots of municipal compost but also fertilizers similar to Miracle-Gro. Maybe it's a combination of the plants. I did have hornworms years ago, so it can't be because of my location, and I've increased the # of tomato plants so you'd think the hornworm population would go up, not down.

Mark
trudyjean82
16 years ago
I read on another forum two winters ago about bruising/pinching the first true stem of the tomatoe plant. Not so hard to pinch it off, but enough to "bruise" it. The plant will send off toxins that the hornworms detest an they stay away. I tried last season on only a few, an did see good results. So this season I did it on all my tomatoe plants an have yet to see a hornworm. IF you can remember this next season try it. You'll be pleased with the results. trudyjean

SVB and Tomato Horn Worms..

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Violet_Z6

korney19

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