Tomato Hornworms, Part 2
The Trials of a New England Gardener
This is an excerpt from the tongue-in-cheek column by M.R. Montgomery which appeared in the Boston Globe April 11, 1988. I unearthed the clipping recently and you’ll find references to insecticides and MTV that precede current sensibilities but it’s an amusing read.
When it comes to actually planting tomatoes, we have to keep a sharp eye out for worms. There are two kinds of bad worms, not to be confused with earthworm, which is one of nature’s blessings and stays in the ground where it belongs.
The first worm to worry about is the cutworm, which hides in the [soil] all day and sneaks out at night. It cuts the tomato plant off at the ground and eats the top and goes away. These are two things you can do. You can put piles of insecticide on the ground around the tomatoes, or you can cut both ends off some tin cans and stick the resulting bimetallic cylinders around the baby tomato plants. The cutworm is neither agile nor persistent, and if you don’t mind your garden resembling the town dump, I’d suggest you try the tin cans.
The second worm to worry about is the tomato hornworm, which gets to be bigger than your thumb and uglier than sin (or uglier than sin used to be, before MTV). It is green, soft and squishy. There are two ways to get rid of tomato hornworms. You can put more insecticide on the plants, or you can hire local children, assuming that the children in your neighborhood are less squeamish than you are, and pay them five cents for every worm they pick off the plants.
This is cheaper than insecticide and qualifies you as an organic-type gardener. I would suggest the honor system, by the way, because if there is anything uglier than one tomato hornworm, it’s a jarful being shaken out on the back porch and counted.
The good thing about tomatoes is that almost nothing eats them except the worms. Rabbits find the leaves distasteful. The Japanese beetle, which eats almost anything will not bother a tomato plant…
My advice is not to mess with tomatoes. By the time yours are ripe, they’ll be a glut on the market. Plant flowers in your [soil] and give them away all summer, and surely someone will repay you in tomatoes.
M.R. Montgomery was a Boston Globe columnist.
