I think of my yard as "The Garden of the Good Intentions." Another gardener friend says it more bluntly - "my intentions are good but my execution stinks." Photos are terrible at showing the hoses, scattered pots, weeds, whatever. The heart sees the beauty that is there, or is dreamed of. Your garden looks good to me! Who cares about the trash bag, or tarp??? Out here, where it doesn't rain from May - Oct, every bit of lushness is a treat. People would kill for those hostas. My "Rooguci" clematis is a spindly little thing, and yours is so lovely - I've finally figured out that clematis wants way more moisture than I'm ever going to give them! Anita

They will never go away. If you spray them it will only kill the baby budworms, then the adults will lay more eggs, and you will have to spray again all year until winter. They are endemic. Pat Welch, who wrote that book on SoCal goardening, says to begin spraying in April with the maiden flight of the budworm moth at around the time of the full moon. I have to spray my garden every week. Thank goodness for BT. I use a hand held squirt bottle so I can avoid getting BT on the milkweeds and passion vines, where the butterfly larva grow up. I'm sorry. Renee

Thanks for the input, Erin. I never did figure out what these were--I wish I'd gotten a better picture, or kept the leaf in a jar and watched to learn for myself. I've grown tomatoes for a while now, but this is the first year I've had the time to pay attention to the details and try to figure out what, exactly, is going on in my garden. I've been lucky so far. I started out with loads of aphids and was getting itchy to spray with soap, but instead planted more sweet alyssum among the marigolds around the tomatoes and crossed my fingers. Ladybug, flower fly, and a few lacewing larvae popped up shortly after the aphids did, and the aphid population dropped off. There are plenty of pinkish-tan aphid mummies too, which does my vengeful heart good. So far only a few striped cucumber beetles and no signs of hornworms yet, though I've found a couple gray-brown 1 1/2" long caterpillars near the tomatoes. I'm going to try to stick with the no-insecticide method this year.

Hummingbird moths are also sphinx moths, but the ones generally called that are the dayflying sphinx moths that nectar on flowers (or rotting fruit if available), like the Snowberry Clearwing that resembles a large bumblebee, and the Nessus sphinx that is a beautiful reddish brown with two cream colored stripes across the lower abdomen. Few of the sphinx fly during the day, and most are nocturnal, as is the Tomato and Tobacco Hornworm moths. You can generally spot them at dusk, just as light is beginning to wane, or in the early morning just before sunrise. The adult moths have 5 yellow spots on either side of their abdomen in the case of the Tomato Hornworm, and 6 spots of yellow in the case of the Tobacco Hornworm moth. Their wings move just as a Hummingbirds, too, and they hover at flowers like them also. They are fascinating to watch because no other moth family does this. Moths outnumber butterflies by 10 to 1. The tomato and tobacco hornworms use Solanaceous plants for larval food, e.g., tomato, tobacco, pepper, potatoe, Datura, Brugmansia and many more. However, tomato is generally the favored food. The Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms are large sphinx moths as indicated by the size of the caterpillars. The Hummingbird moths, like the Snowberry and the Nessus, are much smaller. I find larvae of the Snowberry Clearwing on my large honeysuckle vine, and the Nessus on my Virginia Creeper, which hosts a wide variety of various species of sphinx caterpillars. They are very cool to raise. Hope this may inspire some of you to observe them in the garden. They aren't all bad. Susan Here is a link that might be useful: Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms and Adult Moths