Not here.... Maybe we will hear something soon. He might be planting maters about now. Rob

I don't use pesticides either, and have been gardening in the back yard for many years. My main reason for gardening has been to save grocery dollars. We love the flavor of "real" tomatoes, which, if we can even find them locally, are expensive. So it just seemed counter-productive to me to be spending extra dollars on all that expensive poison. Not to mention that I have little patience with the FDA which rules some things safe till we've used them 20 years, and then decides they're not safe and has them taken off the market. What are we to the FDA, anyway, guinea pigs???? Oh, sure, I lose a few things now and then, but that's a small price to pay. I do have to try to get out there when I see the little yellow moths, and cover my zucchini with some curtain sheers I bought at a yard sale. If I don't, they lay their eggs and the worms burrow into the woody stems and kill the plant. I know you can cut them out with a knife, but I haven't found that to work really well. Someone told me you can wrap aluminum foil around the stems and prevent the laying of the eggs, but I haven't tried that. Usually by the time the plants are killed, I've had enough zucchini anyway. And on the topic of tomatoes that keep -- you really don't have to buy a special variety to keep tomatoes up to Christmas in Oklahoma. When the first killing frost is forecast, go out and pick all the green tomatoes off the vines. The small ones, you can use for green tomato relish, or make into dilly green tomatoes or even green tomato mincemeat -- or you can fry them!! The bigger ones, spread a few layers of newspaper on a table in an unheated basement and set the tomatoes in rows on that. Don't do more than one layer. Go down every once in awhile to check, as you'll have some that might rot. But you'll have others that go ahead and ripen, slowly. I've heard of people who carefully wrap them in newspaper, and pack them in a box to keep in a cool place. I wouldn't think you'd want to make more than one layer in the box, though, and you'd want to check them often to remove any that might have gone bad. The flavor's not as good, but still better than those rubbery grocery store ones. Also, you can freeze ripe tomatoes whole. I do this in the heat of summer when I don't want to heat up the kitchen to can them. Cut out the core and drop them into a zip-lock bag. Use them to cook with later on. No need to peel, when they thaw the peel slips right off. Bear in mind, they're not PERFECT this way, the tomato doesn't break up as well as it would if you were cooking with fresh tomatoes, but the flavor's still good. Smaller tomatoes are best done this way. If the tomato is pretty big I usually cut it into pieces before freezing.

I suspect something in my garden's little ecosystem controls the hornworms, because I see the moths every morning and every evening. They're outside nectaring at the night-blooming flowers right now. Or, possibly the wild birds take care of them. Since we put out bird seed and water for the birds, my garden is full of birds every waking moment. Mo, Borage is an herb. I've grown it for about 15 years now. I started growing it as a companion plant for tomatoes and have continued growing it because the bees love it so. With all the trouble our bees are having nowadays, I'm always careful to plant tons of nectar plants for them. Right now, out in the pastures there's not much for the bees, so they visit my garden a lot. The only native plant that is green and blooming in the pasture right now (everything else is dried and crispy) is the frogfruit. I should move some frogfruit to the garden this year so it will be there next year for the bees. Borage doesn't reseed heavily for me most years. I think it is likely my clay soil is so wet in wet winters that the seeds probably rot. I always grow the blue-flowered borage, and some years I grow the white-flowered version as well. You find the seed in the herb section of garden catalogs and sometimes you see it on seedracks as well. Joiseygirl, If you go back and look at the photos in the link, look at the last photo...where the little 'caps' are open on the cocoons to show the wasps have emerged. I think when the majority of the cocoons have the caps open like that, then you can remove the hornworms without any worry that you'll hurt the wasps. You probably could remove them even before that, but what you want to do is to encourage the brachonid wasps to stick around, so the less you disturb them before they emerge, the better. Dawn

Logan, if you still have those caterpillars, please find an alternate host plant for them. They are increasingly rare in central oklahoma. If you have any weeds in the nighshade family or have puncturevine or goathead stickers, relocate the cats to those plants. Tobacco hornworms love puncturevine and by orienting them to this grossly noxious weed, the resulting moths wil be more likely to be imprinted to the plant, too. Biological control!