It's getting to be that time. My first hatch usually starts around the end of the second week in June.

As to what to do: depends on the number of plants and how much time you have. ;) Hand picking and squishing provides a certain satisfaction to the grower with the time to do it daily. Otherwise Bt.

Good luck. All poop trails lead to a worm. ;)

Dave

The 'tomato hornworm" is actually the cat stage of a fantastic moth.
Depending on the type of moth that deposited the egg it could morph into a moth the size of a hummingbird.
Around here we have found the Sphinx Clearwing Hummingbird Moth. A startling, fantastic looking moth often mistaken for the hummingbird.
The only effective way I have found to keep SEVERE damage to your tomato plants , is to regularly patrol your garden for them.
They are very hard to find, as noted above they are camo'ed very well in the dense foilage. Often found at the top third of the plant munching away.
I snip the part of the branch they are hanging on, and relocate the bugger to another part of the property to take it's chances.
Later in the season we will see them at the hummingbird feeder or nestled on the leaves of an evergreen.

Tom

I'm not sure exactly what they actually are, just green little caterpillar(sp?) looking things.
I doubt they are the ones that will hatch into the large hummingbird like moths mentioned above as I have never seen anything like that in this area.
I guess I'll just try and keep an eye out for them and squash as I find them.
Do these potentially become an entire crop killing problem?
I am growing 9 plants this year.
All in containers/raised beds

~~~ Do these potentially become an entire crop killing problem? ~~~

Hornworms can eat A LOT very quickly.

A couple yrs. ago they ate near to half of two bushy 6' potted plants while I was away for a 4 day trip.

Windclimber and I do not share the same affection for these ravenous monsters :-)

Lots of pics of hornworms in various stages on the web so you should be able to ID them easily. But green - same color as the plant with poop piles - usually means hornworms.

And yes, as other Dave said, they can destroy a plant. So squish, or save and move if you wish, but get them off the plants either way. ;)

Dave - the other one ;)

I go on patrol for the worms. As stated, they are hard to spot. When I follow the trail and find one, or several, I don't take them off the plant, I just cut 'em in two with pruning clippers and let the buggers drip from both sections. In the heat it dries up in short order. Squashing them is waaaaay too much trouble!

HA
Found a bunch of little poops on a leaf, looked, looked adn looked at the leaves above....FOUND HIM!!

if they are anything like the one i found...they aren't small!!! this guy was about the size of a penny in dia. and about 3-4 in long!! a major muncher

They get big fast. They are voracious. You can find them easier just by looking for the plant that is being stripped. Bt is good but if you find one, kill it with your hands because you don't want to wait. They rear up like they're going to strike at you, but it's all bluster.

If you have any kids, give the job to them and they will love it. Hunting bugs is the most fun you can have before puberty.

bdobs-

First, what we have here in the Bay Area is the Tobacco Horn worm, not the Tomato Horn worm. The difference is in the striping along their sides. They start out very small (so does their poop) But once they get going they increase in size at a fantastic rate because of their appetite. I intended to raise one to go through the phases to a mature moth a couple of years ago but the thing ate so much so fast that I was cutting branches off of my tomato plants to feed it. They eat 24/7. As they increase in size so does their poop. Which is one way to find them on your plants. Anyway I didn't want to keep cutting my plants to feed it so I put it on the patio table and within 30 seconds a Bluejay swooped down and grabbed it. Can't say I felt too sorry for it after seeing what it did to the leaves and unripened fruit.

The one in the video below attacked my tweezers as I tried to pull it off of a branch. Didn't know they could move so fast.

Here is a link that might be useful: Tobacco Horn worm attacking tweezers

What you might find also some day are one of these nasty gross things (they are pretty formidable in the moth stage too)covered with white eggs. Quite anoter spectical of nature.
Great video d bob ! Don't get me wrong guys I don't tolerate them in the garden:)

Tom

Yeah, they put up a show of fighting back, but they don't really have anything to hurt you with. They're just soft slugs, really. They get a really tight grip on the branches with those legs of theirs, though, so if you want to collect one without squishing it, you're better off just cutting the branch off than trying to peel it off the branch.

Outstanding video!

Thanks.

Wow, crazy video, mean little sucker. Good think they dont have sharp hard teeth, as I may be afraid of my Tomato

I'm in Florida so things over here may be completely different but they are usually so small and massive in numbers that BT is the only way to go...works well on the cukes and zukes too. I'm not sure what your local product will be but for us here the liquid BT is available at HD as Thuricide, you may be able to get the powdered form of BT (Dipel) but I've heard some say that it leaves a funny taste on the fruit.

Here is a link that might be useful: Thuricide

Awhhh, he's tired.

I just returned from being out of town for a few days and found that hormworms had destroyed several of my best tomato plants. These things were huge and ugly! But even though they had stripped the entire plants of leaves and ruined most of the tomatoes, some were still difficult to spot. Anyhow, I put quite a few pics of them (and the damage they inflicted) on my blog linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Container Gardening in the Desert

I nearly peed myself - 6 minutes of a hornworm attacking tweezers! Man oh man... I love this forum.