I dug out the 2 tomato plants and squished the hornmowrms. Hoping some bird find those little treats !! Is there any way to prevent them from attacking again? I did read somewhere not to kill them if they had white eggs on them, these little buggers didn;t.I really really want to grow some tomatoes !! :)

they say to plant ghost peppers at least three feet apart. this is my first time growing ghost peppers and after 20 years, what i found is that if you plant ghost peppers and all your other peppers at least one foot apart the leaves will touch and start shading the lower leaves. causing lower temps. bigger faster growers in the back and smaller slow growers in the front. i live in central texas near temple and waco and the heat has been in mid 90s. i have been getting ghost peppers on the vine but at a slow pace. we had a couple days when the temp were in the high 80 due to rain and the ghost peppers took off. the humidity helps also. it seems the plant needs so many hours of heat and humidity to get adjusted then when it gets adjusted it will take off. i have one ghost pepper plant in a far corner of the garden with no other pepper plants around and i do not have a single pepper on it. shade cloth will help but you still need that one day of weather in the high 80 and lower 90 or high 70. one rainy day will give you that. dont give up on it, just shade it and one day you will walk outside and see a pepper started. your not that far north of me. i never had hornworms on my peppers, but i found one today. caught it in time to keep it from eating the habs. dont get impatient add a shade cloth they sell them at home depot and use calcium to keep new growth on it.

The moth is pretty cool, that these become. I've seen them flying around flowers, like a hummingbird. I pick the worms off and let the kids torture them for a while. But if they get away from the kids, they end up back on my tomatoes. I have grown sacrificial plants for the captured worms, but the worms know and leave the plant! I have never allowed the worms to stay on my plant long enough for the wasp larvae to hatch. It seems like the whole plant could be destroyed by then. And in my small garden, I may have only one plant per variety. I think that the eggs are laid in the fall and hatch in the spring. The worms start out tiny and grow quickly. I have tried companion planting, and have borage, marigolds and calendula readily reseed near my tomatoes. I still end up with hornworms.

dickiefickle, If we had a problem with tomato/tobacco hornworms, I would welcome braconid wasps to my garden! Some of them even parasitize aphids. They cause no harm to humans, pets, structures, possessions or crops. The propagation of braconid wasps and other beneficial insects is why we should avoid using insecticides if they aren't necessary. Wide spread "preventative" spraying is never a good idea. Now the yellow jackets we get every summer...they are a different matter! Betsy Here is a link that might be useful: Images of Braconid Wasps