Carol,

So far, I haven't seen any tomato hornworms, but some folks here have seen damage consistent with tomato hornworms although no one has found the worms yet. I've been out in the evenings and haven't seen any of the moths yet either, but that doesn't mean they aren't here. I found my first Colorado Potato Beetles yesterday, so hand-picked them (actually, held a cup under the CPBs and knocked them into the cup) and fed them to the chickens. The chickens sure had a good time with those CPBs. Tomorrow I'm going to go out and spend some time on a 'search and destroy' mission among the broccoli and cabbage because there's quite a bit of looper and cabbage worm damage. It's just that time of the year. I've even had stinkbugs already and they usually aren't an issue here until it gets hot.

I haven't specifically checked 'Yummy' but most of my peppers have flowers and/or fruit. They, along with the tomatoes, are flowering and fruiting exceptionally well for this early in the year, so that means we're likely to get hit by a massive hailstorm (we always seem to have one when the garden is off to a good early start).

How are your peas? Mine woke up yesterday with a not so lovely case of powdery mildew. I may spray them with an organic fungicide this evening when the wind drops. I almost hate to spend the time and effort spraying them when they are nearing the end of their productive life as the heat cranks up. The PM is worse on the Sugar Snaps than on the Super Sugar Snaps. The peas have had a pretty good spring so far and the harvest is up to 13 lbs. total.

Ooops. Watching The Weather Channel and Dr. Forbes is scaring me. Gotta go post weather update for tomorrow.

Dawn

I noticed yesterday that something has munched on some foliage on a couple of my tomato plants, and it also ate a tiny green tomato too. I couldn't find any traces of worms or insects.

Suzie

Add me to the list that has lost some foliage, but no visible worms. I have never seen a hornworm this early, so what is it I wonder.

I have dozens of worms on each broccoli plant too, darn it. Those I can find easily.

This was a very small green worm and very hard to see. Not the typical big ole horn worm. I rarely have hornworms, but last year I found 5 at the very end of the season on my container plants.

This was a very small green worm and very hard to see. Not the typical big ole horn worm. I rarely have hornworms, but last year I found 5 at the very end of the season on my container plants.

Carol, They start out very, very small and go through several instars before they get large, but there are several other green worms that cause trouble on tomatoes including tomato fruitworms.

Scott, Because I overwinter brugmansias and daturas in pots in my garage and the tomato hornworms like them, I can see them as early as February, which happened in 2009. Normally, though, I don't see even the small ones until at least May at the earliest....and it is May now.

Really, though, despite the high number of tomato plants that I grow, I don't really see much damage until at least July.

Regardless what kind of cats are doing damage, Bt is always the answer.

Dawn

Dawn, I never use anything because I have so few, but if they are starting this early, I had better buy something. Remind me of your favorites again, please.

I saw some damage on one of mine yesterday that looked like hornworm damage. I looked and looked, but found nothing. I'm red/green colorblind so I have a hard enough time finding the big ones. I'll never find the small ones!! Never seen hornworm damage this early either.

I HATE those tomato hornworms. They scare me. Get them every year. I always prune a large section of tomato to get rid of them because I cannot stand to pluck them off. EWW.

This year had a tent in my peach tree (early spring) and googled and discovered BT (I won't use weird pesticides on stuff my kiddos are going to eat).I would rather have a wormy peach than a pesticide one.

Sprayed the peach with BT and the tent was gone in 2 days. Since I had some left over, I have been spraying my tomatoes once weekly. No disgusting hornworms yet! Cross your fingers!

Do you mean my favorite Bt? I usually buy Thuricide, but any Bt product labeled a 'caterpillar killer' will take care of them. You use the same product on cole family crops if cabbage loopers/imported cabbage worms are an issue. The key is that it needs to be the Bt 'kurstaki' not Bt 'israelensis' which is for mosquito larvae and fungus gnats, and not Bt 'san diego' or 'tenebrionis' which is for Colorado Potato Beetles. I keep Bt handy but very rarely use it because it will kill all the desirable butterflies and moths. So, when you do use it, take care to spray only the plants that are being targeted by pests and which need the Bt's protection. I never ever spray my flowers because I want the butterflies and moths around.

I try to find a wind-free day to spray so the Bt will go only where I want it and won't blow onto nearby plants that the butterflies and some desirable moths visit, but it has been really hard to fined even a couple of wind-free days this spring.

Last week, on a windy day when the wind was blowing from the east/southeast, I saw a spray rig east of us spraying a pasture, probably with a herbicide. The wind was blowing pretty hard so that made me nervous, since last year I had plant damage on the eastern edge of the garden after that same pasture was sprayed. I haven't seen any damage though and that is a relief. I need to spray my broc and cabbage with Bt but the wind just won't stop. Today it would be pointless to spray anyway since today's/tonight's storms likely would wash away anything I sprayed anyway.

I've linked the one I usually buy, which is made by Bonide, but Safer and other companies also have Bt products. Last year, I found it at our Tractor Supply store, and the one sold there was bottled under a "Southern States Agriculture" label.

Here is a link that might be useful: Bonide Thuricide looks like this

Oh, you guys are hurting my heart!!!

Tomato Hornworms (or what you are probably seeing rather is Tobacco Hornworms, because we have many more of these than Tomato Hornworms) are so called because of the "horn" on the last segment of the body. If it doesn't have a "horn", it is not a hornworm.

There are many, many moths with caterpillars that consume just about anything - called "generalists" because they eat such a variety of plants it's impossible to nail down what their host plant actually is. There are also many "green" caterpillars, so would need more description, or photo if possible, to identify.

I understand if gardening on a large scale, like Dawn for instance, not wanting an invasion of these big, hungry cats. But in a small garden, like mine, I grow other plants that they like just as much, like Daturas and Nicotianas, that I can feed them as an alternative to tomato. I like having the adult moths around for pollination. They have a probiscis that is about 4-6" long, and are especially beneficial for pollinating deep-throated flowers, like the Daturas, Brugmansias, and Nicotianas.

I've attached the image of the more commonly seen Tobacco Hornworm. Note the red horn and the white slashes. The Tomato Hornworm has a "black" horn, and white chevrons.

Susan

Here is a link that might be useful: Tobacco Hornworm

I must confess, I did not check for a horn. I just quickly removed it and gave it to a chicken.

I happened to be in the feed store today and they had Fertilome Dipel Dust with the active ingredient of Bacilus Thuringiensis var. Kurstaki. I am seeing damage on several plants but have only located one worm. I will only use the BT if I need to, but I will not tolerate hornworms if I can get rid of them.

Susan,

For the record, I generally move them to the other nightshades that I grow specifically for them or to wild nightshades. Even after I bought Bt last year, I never sprayed it on the tomato plants. I have enough plants that I can allow some damage. Gardeners with a lesser number of tomato plants are generally less inclined to tolerate damage to their plants and I don't blame them. I recommend Bt for them, and I always have it handy, but I rarely use it myself. Or, if I use it, I'll spray it on a damaged plant but only after diligently searching for the hornworms so I move them to another plant. If I can't find them, I spray the plant if I have to in order to save it. I probably don't spray 3 tomato plants in an average year, and some years I don't spray any.

One particular hornworm last year spent its time at the very tip top of the Tess's Land Race Currant, over 8' up in the air, where I couldn't even reach it from the lower rungs of the ladder, and I was too chicken to climb higher on the ladder because the ground slopes. That hornworm got to have an all-you-can-eat party on that plant. I could have sprayed the plant with Bt from the ladder, but just didn't want to spray Bt.

We love the moths and plant lots of night-blooming plants for them, but there is a point where a given tomato plant has had all the damage it can handle and I have to step in and remove or kill that hornworm before the plant is toast.

Dawn

Susan,
Thanks for the great information. I will pay more attention to which I have now. I think I've had both but not for sure. And for the record you won't like me. If they are on a tomato plant they have walked on sacred ground. Jay

Jay,

I try to walk the middle ground because I love the little hummingbird moths and like seeing them visit our nightblooming flowers. It was our son, then in his early teens, who convinced me that I should let them live because he liked the moths, so I mostly let them live. I try to find them and move them to other plants when I can. Every now and then though, one makes me mad by eating, like, half a tomato plant in one night and that usually seals its death warrant. I think I killed 5 last year which is nothing...we have them all over creation here because our county has thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of acres of pastures with native nightshade plants. It is not unusual for us to walk out into the yard on any given summer evening and have a dozen or two dozen of the moths visiting the night-blooming flowers. I even see the pokey little things crawling across the road to go from pasture to pasture. Why they'd leave one pasture full of nightshade plants to cross a road to another pasture full of identical plants is quite beyond me....I guess the grass looks greener on the other side. Tim and I have joked "why does the hornworm cross the road" and the answer is "it's looking for our garden".

Dawn

You guys are just too funny, Dawn! I don't blame anyone for not wanting the hornworms eat their tomatos....and peppers....and eggplant! I just like to present them with another side of the story, that they walk a thin line between being a pest and being a beneficial. They also walk a thin line by crossing roads evidently! LOL! All caterpillars wander away from their host plants, either to shed their skin (they can't possibly stay in the same skin as the tiny larvae they begin life as), OR to find a place to pupate. They eat and grow until the skin gets too tight for them, and then they usually wander off somewhere away from the plant where they become motionless until the skin splits open, is shed, and they have a new, looser skin in which to continue eating and growing. They do this about 5 times during the caterpillar cycle (called "instars"). Pretty much all caterpillars do this. They eat their old skin and then have to find their host plant again to resume feeding.

When they reach their final instar of growth, they also wander away to find a place to pupate. These particular moth caterpillars pupate under ground a few inches, and emerge in about 2 weeks or so, unless it is fall, and they pupate underground over winter to emerge in spring as adult moths.

Females have pheromones which call the males to them for breeding and she will then lay her eggs on the appropriate host plants. The eggs are green, semi-translucent sphericals layed on the underside of the foliage. If you just have a couple of plants, you can inspect them for eggs and remove them before they even hatch. A tedious job at best.

So caterpillars crossing the road are looking for a place to shed their skin (they do this as a protective behavior since they must stay motionless for at least a day, and in this state they are more susceptible to predators), or they are looking for a place to pupate underground.

If those of you who don't like the Hornworms find a caterpillar with tiny white cocoons all over it, it has been parasitized by tiny wasps. The caterpillar will die eventually and the wasps will emerge from their tiny cocoons to continue parasitizing more Hornworms. So you might want to keep these in the garden.

More than anyone wanted to know, I'm sure, but interesting.

Susan

Here is a link that might be useful: Hornworm Eggs

Susan,

I often find the pupae in my garden soil. The very first time I found a really large one in the soil in early spring...probably in 1999 or 2000, it took me a while to figure out what in the world it was.

Do you know that for all the many beneficial wasps we have here, I almost never find a hornworm parisitized? I don't know why. I guess I could be cocky and say it is because the wasps cannot find the hornworms hidden in the lush and beautiful foliage of my tomato plants. More likely, though, it is because the plants are planted so close together that they eventually merge into one big jungle and nobody can find anything, including me not being able to find parisitized worms. : )

We have, of course, both the tomato and tobacco hornworms and moths here, and several other less well-known types, including the ones that always eat the Virginia creeper.

We're having a great butterfly and moth year here, and have those bordered patch butterflies everywhere now. I 'm sure the sunflowers will start looking devoured quite soon.

Dawn

I love the Bordered Patches and the Texas Crescents. The BPs can eat all the Sunflowers and Crownbeard that they want IMHO - LOL! The TCs use plants in the Acanthus family as hosts.

I saw a beautiful Mourning Cloak yesterday - think they are one of our most stunning butterflies, but I rarely see more than one or two at a time. This one had about a 4" wingspread on it. They, along with the Question Marks, Hackberry and Tawny Emperors, and Red Admirals, and some diurnal sphinx moths, love to nectar on my rotting banana feeder. The MC is black on the underwings with about a 1/4" cream colored ruffle around the wings, with tiny maroon dots just inside the ruffle. The upperwings are mainly black, but have much more color, such as blue and maroon dots, too. Gorgeous. Do you ever see them, Dawn?

This year's most prolific butterflies are the Red Admirals and the Question Marks. There are tons of them around.

For those interested, to attract lots of these beauties, I hang a suet feeder and put my old black bananas in it. You will see tons of them. They also feed on dung and tree sap, from which they derive the nectar and minerals they need to sustain them. This feeder also attracts fruit flies that the Hummingbirds eat for protein! Might not want to hang near your door, but it's always fun to watch the butterflies on it.

I have raised 4 different Sphinx moths on my Virginia Creeper. In the grape family, many grape farmers do not like them, but I love them. They include the Pandora Sphinx, Virginia Creeper sphinx, Achemon sphinx, and Nessus sphinx. I love the Nessus, since they fly during the day (diurnal), and find them frequently nectaring on the flowers while I am out gardening. They get so used to me that they will nectar on flowers right by me without being frightened off. I have also seen them on the fruit feeder, too. Another Virginia Creeper feeder is the lovely little Eight-Spotted Forester, often mistaken for a butterfly, which are day-flying moths as well, but I don't raise them since they have quirky pupation needs - they burrow into wood holes to pupate - so I leave them on the vine to be on their own.

So happy it is a good butterfly year. Lots of Sulphurs around, too.

Susan

Susan,

Sometimes I see Mourning Cloaks and Question Marks, and both are abundant this year. The Question Marks arrived exceptionally early...when we still had snow in the forecast. You know that I have sulphurs all over every year and some of them are the very large sulphurs that you once told me are much more common in Texas (makes sense, with Texas on 3 sides of me), and this year they were among the earliest arrivals. We have lots of hackberry trees in our woodland, especially on the edge of the woodland closest to my garden so I see the Hackberry Emperors too.

There are lots of sphinx moths here and I don't know the names of them all, but the white-lined sphinx is the most common. The ones that eat the Virginia Creeper are always around in large numbers, but I don't often see them up close because most of the creeper is in the snake-infested woods and you know I don't step foot in there during snake season (roughly late March through late November). We have the cute little Snowberry Clearwing and then, sadly, the obnoxious clearwing that is the moth of the squash vine borer. How I wish we didn't have that one!

We have had tons and tons and tons of all kinds of swallowtails. In March and April they were especially thrilled to find the perennial dianthus plants flowering in the veggie garden. I've got 4 or 5 dianthus there that come back every year and the swallowtails were standing (flying?) in line waiting to get to the flowers. It was thrilling to see them all.

I noticed today my common orange-flowered butterfly weed is blooming in the cottage border, but haven't seen any of it blooming alongside the fencelines and bar ditches like I usually do. I am always insanely proud when the ones I raised from seed come back every year, but how hard can they be to grow when they are growing wild everywhere here? That thought keeps me from getting an inflated opinion of my own seed-starting ability.

I hope everyone in OK is having a great butterfly and moth year too. They add so much beauty to our landscapes and gardens....well, except for the moths that bring us corn earworms, European corn borers, and squash vine borers. I could live without all of those.

Dawn

Excess Tomato Tone is rumoured to be often lethal to hornworms, all varieties. If the hornworms arrive exhausted from say, having crossed the road, the mortality rate goes way up.

Just found 2 THW on my plants.

I find the borers less than attractive myself, Dawn, but not growing many of their preferred hosts, I don't really see them.

Asclepias tuberosa, or Butterfly Weed, is, I find, difficult to grow in a cultivated situation, They much prefer neglect and lean but friable soil, such as a sandy and, or rocky soil, good drainage. They also prefer very minimal water as the tuberous root stores water. They do well in drought years. They are a fantastic nectar plant, but rarely, if at all, host any Monarchs, because they contain extremely low amounts of the cardiac glycosides that protect the Monarchs. You will notice that if you break a stem, it is clear fluid rather than the typical milky fluid that you see on other milkweeds.

You would not find me traipsing around your Virginia Creeper looking for sphinx moth caterpillars, Dawn! Whew! I don't mind the little garter snakes I occasionally find, but nothing more extreme than that, please! My poor VC was beaten to death in the hail storm. Only the older, tougher leaves made it thru. All new growth is gone. So I may not have any sphinx cats for awhile.

Susan

I have looked and looked on the damaged tomato plants and I can't find anymore worms. Everytime I walk out my back door, 10 or 20 birds go flying away, so maybe they are taking care of the problem.

It is a great butterfly year here, and bees too. I'm a real novice when it comes to identifying butterflies, but I've been taking pictures of them so I can compare them with pictures online and learn what they are. And there are bees everywhere. We have a big patch of white clover that the bees love. I asked my husband to leave it alone when he mowed this week, and he humored me and mowed around it. Back to tomato worms .... I found two tomatoes tonight with big holes eaten in them :(. But I still didn't find any trace of the worms.

Suzie

Oh man, I have been dreading the arrival of the hornworm. I noticed something had been nibbling on my plants, but wasn't concerned it was a hornworm because it would only eat a few leaves instead of the whole plant. I have found a couple of very small green caterpillars, no horns, and I believe they had a white stripe, if I remember correctly. I normally don't use any type of pesticide, organic or not, but bought some organicide this year. I haven't had a chance to apply it though with all the rain and wind!

All that became a null point last night though, when I looked out my back window right as the lightning flashed and saw that all but a few of my 54 tomato cages had been blown over by the storm. I made it out very lucky though, with just a couple of smooshed plants.

Suzie, there is a great book out there, Butterflies of Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Texas, that is a guide to identification of the many butterflies found in Oklahoma, and their favored larval host plants.

There is also an online resource produced by Montana State University that addresses the butterflies and moths found in each state. I have attached a link to the site referencing Oklahoma. They don't show images of the caterpillars I don't believe, but once you have identified the butterfly, you can search the Internet by googling the name+caterpillar images.

Other online resources include Bug Guide and What's That Bug, and of course, the Butterly Gardening Forum here at GW.

Here is a link that might be useful: Butterflies and Moths of Oklahoma

Suzie,

It amazes me how hard hornworms can be to spot. Sometimes I'll find one after looking at a plant for a very long time and only after I find it will I realize how many times I'd looked at that same exact spot earlier and didn't see it then. One thing you can do is look for the green frass (caterpillar poop) on the ground or on leaves. Then, look in that general area for the cat.

In the image linked below, the frass is the dark green pile of stuff just behind the horn end of the hornworm.

Ny poor DH has learned to mow around virtually all wildflowers until they've set seed....so much so that sometimes when he is finished mowing the pastures, there's more uncut areas with wildflowers than cut portions with nicely mowed pasture grasses. Sometimes I wonder why he feels compelled to mow the pastures at all because he spends a lot of time dodging wildflowers. I mow differently when I do it. I cut a 6 to 8 foot wide path through the pasture, period, and nothing else. If we need to walk through the pastures, we have a wide, mowed trail and can see snakes before we step on them. Otherwise, everything is left to bloom and set seed.

cat22woman,

Many things nibble on tomato plants and just because something has nibbled on yours, that doesn't necessarily mean you have tomato hornworms or tobacco hornworms or even any sort of worms at all, although you might.

Many organic insecticides, depending on what they are, have absolutely no effect on caterpillars, so if you know you're seeing caterpillar damage be sure to use a product that targets caterpillars.

Among the pests that eat tomato plants in my garden are grasshoppers, some birds, rabbits and deer. Well, deer no longer do because we have a 7' tall fence to exclude them from the garden, but they certainly have nibbled at plants often in the past and, during some years, have eaten them down right to the ground.

It is good you came through the storm with relatively little damage to your plants. Were your tomato cages staked to prevent them from falling over? It is always better to stake the cages when you put them around the plants to avoid them falling over or being blown over, though if your winds exceed 50 to 60 mph, even staked cages will sometimes come down. It might not seem like a big deal if a cage falls down because you can always pick it back up, but once the plants are big enough that they fall over with the cages, then each time a plant/cage combination falls onto the ground, the parts of the plant that touch the ground are very prone to become diseased.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: image of hornworm with frass

Just for prosperity, know that my comment about Tomato Tone above was meant to be a joke. Susanlynne recently posted elsewhere she thought she had used too much Tomato Tone so this was my way of teasing her a bit. Since no one has laughed, I wanted to clarify, so that five years from now we wouldn't be trying to figure out whether it was true....

I laughed. You just didn't hear me.

Then I posted a brief thread that said how very clever you were to weave together the earlier comments about Tomato Tone and the hornworms crossing the road. I hit 'submit' and my computer when down. So, even though you didn't know it, I laughed and responded. lol

I can see where someone might look back at this in a few months or a year and wonder what in the world was going on here. : )

I laughed as well, but it was at the vision of Susan outdoors trying to 'flush' that soil. LOL

I was hoping someone would fix the post tho. I didn't want seedmama hearing from the Tomato Tone folks. LOL

Seedmama,

I got a huge chuckle out of your clever 'insight'. I just didn't jump in to say so. In fact, I particularly enjoy your sense of humor and the ways you choose to express it!

"I didn't want Seedmama hearing from the Tomato Tone folks."

That part hadn't even crossed my mind. Is TT owned by Monsanto? All I need are henchmen showing up at my door!!! Not to worry. I'd just hand them a pair of work gloves and put them to work.

When architect husband and I built our home with our own two hands it attracted more attention in our small town than we really would have cared for. Our 'unconventional' methods, many imported all the way from Texas, raised a lot of eyebrows. Later in the project a plumber stopped by to tell us that the city inspector had asked him if we knew what we were doing. (We were the only homeowners he'd ever met who owned their own copy of the building code, and he sometimes stopped by to refer to ours because he didn't have one.) But I digress.

It took us three hot summer months to set up forms for our basement, and on the morning of the pour the concrete pump truck set up at 6 a.m. A pump truck has a boom on it that the uninitiated might refer to as a crane. A crane in a residential area of a tiny town cause quite a commotion, and lots of people drove from miles around to see what it was about. I was scrambling with last minute details and looked up to see what equated to the gallery at a golf tournament. I grabbed tools and supplies, marched into the gallery and gave marching orders. Some went to work, others hurriedly dispersed. I had a couple of smokers of baby back ribs going all day, so many stayed for the duration. At the end of the pour, we sat around eating ribs and making new friends.

So don't think I wouldn't give gloves and a hoe to henchmen. But I don't know that I would feed them.

Susan,
Thank you for the info on that book, and for the link. Both of those will be a big help in learning to identify all the butterflies out here.

Dawn,
Thank you too, now that I know what frass looks like, maybe I'll have better luck spotting the worms. I think it must be worms instead of some other kind of insect because the holes are large and just the size a worm would make. And they aren't the kind of holes that birds make when they peck tomatoes. I know that because the very first tomato that ripened was found by the birds before I had a chance to pick it .... grrrr!

Suzie

Suzie,

You're welcome.

And, I hate to say it, but you can use animal excrement to learn a whole lot about what kind of animals are roaming your propery at night. We have almost 15 acres (much of it heavily wooded and full of snakes, so we mostly stay out of that area during snake season) and there are all kinds of wildlife trails. You can tell by the animal's scat what sort of animals are passing through on a regular basis. When we moved to the country, I never knew how much time I'd spend looking at caterpillar frass or animal scat.....one of those things no one tells you about before you move to the country.

Dawn

Ha Ha Ha, Hee Hee Hee, ROTFLMAO! I knew that was a joke at my expense, y'all! But I have to admit, for a moment there, I thought you were serious! If it HAD been true, it would have been okay, because I am protecting my tomato plants like a Mama Bear - do they eat tomatos BTW?

What would have been so funny about imagining I was flushing my tomatos, now?????? LOL

Actually, caterpillar frass is a good organic fertilizer, and is listed as such on a website that notes various NPK of things. I dump my containers of frass from raising hornworms on my garden. So, put that image in your head now.....giggle!

Other signs to look for:

1. When the caterpillars are small, the frass will look like the leaf has been sprinkled with pepper. As the cats get bigger, so goes the frass. Bigger cat, bigger poop.

2. When small, the foliage will have a small hole where the egg hatchs. Before they eat any foliage, newly hatched cats are white and are about 1/2" long. As they eat, they turn green with their consumption of leaves.

3. Early damage appears as chewed leaf edges, from the outside leaf margin, and then inward toward the vein. The first couple of instars of growth, they don't eat the veins, but as they get larger, they will consume the entire leaf.

3. Sometimes you can find them by noting a leaf that is hanging down lower than the others. The weight of a large hornworm will do that.

4. Often you'll find them in a position where their first 3 prolegs are raised up, and that position is what gave them their common name of "sphinx".

I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all, but if you take the time to really look at them closely, they really are beautiful caterpillars. It's hard, I know, because I don't find much beauty in say, WASPS - Yikes! But I try......

You don't have to like something to appreciate its beauty. It truly makes me wonder at God's creations.

Susan

Susan,
Maybe armed with these signs of what to look for, I will finally find the worms. I looked again today (before reading this) and there is more leaf damage but I still couldn't find hide nor hair of whatever is eating them. Our 3-year-old grandson is spending the weekend with us, and he is at that age where he wants to kill all the bugs he finds. He was just about to exterminate a ladybug when I intervened and picked it up and we carried it over to the garden and placed it on a tomato plant. I explained how ladybugs are the good bugs that eat the bad bugs. He was fascinated by that and that was all he could talk about afterwards.

And Dawn, I have been noticing some animal droppings on the patio and the sidewalks that are smaller than a cat's but look similar, sort of like a small tootsie roll, about as big around as a pencil or slightly larger and a little longer than an inch.

Suzie

Suzie,

We have toads that love to hang out on our front porch to catch the bugs that are attracted to the porch light. They often leave behind their toosie rolls. lol

Could very well be something else but that was the first thing that came to mind.

Lynn

Suzie,

Lynn's ID is right on. It could be toad or frog or it could be raccoon. (I hope not. Raccoons are quite vicious and will kill cats, kittens and all forms of poultry.)

I am linking (and I hate to say these words) my favorite animal scat ID website, If you answer the questions, they lead you right to the answer/ID.

The ones I see most often are coyote (often full of animal hair and persimmon seeds), rabbit and deer....but we have all kinds of other critters here.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Scat website

Ohhhhhhhhhh ..... toads, that makes perfect sense because we have them all over the place. I even leave the porch lights on purposely so they'll have lots of bugs to eat. I would never have guessed that those tootsie rolls are from toads, lol. Thank you Lynn and Dawn. Oh, and last night we saw a tree frog in the strangest place, it was on top of the ledge at the very top of our front door. I've never seen one before other than in a picture.

Suzie

Suzie,

You're welcome.

Tree frogs are a hoot. They'll hang out all over the place and provide you with great entertainment. At our house, they often hang out in the potted tropical plants on the patio, on the metal walls of our detached barn-style garage, in window boxes filled with begonias, in/on the canna lilies, and in/on every container of plants I have anywhere and everywhere. Yesterday I was transplanting some flowers into the veggie garden (I use them as companion plants to attract beneficial insects) and I found a green tree frog sitting there in the middle of the transplants. I had popped the plants out of their six-packs and placed them in a red/white enamel bowl so I could carry that bowl with me and kneel in the pathways and pop them quickly into the raised beds. I did leave that enamel bowl sitting in a little red wagon in the shade of the arbor for an hour or so while I harvested veggies. When I picked up the second plant, there set a tree frog in the bowl. Scared me to death and I was just glad it wasn't a snake.

Every year we have lots of tree frogs attach themselves to our breakfast room window or living room windows. Those windows face the south. I've never had them on west-, east- or north-facing windows though.

I love all the tree frogs, but it took me a while to get used to the one that sounds like a woman screaming in the distance. The first few times I heard it, I was petrified because I thought that somewhere within hearing distance some poor woman was being killed. (I was SUCH a city girl when I moved here!)

Dawn