I’ve been noticing that there are caterpillars EVERYWHERE right now. When I was weeding the backyard, I came across thousands of caterpillars in a dozen or so different varieties. They better not be trying to eat my garden!
I was working in the living room yesterday and something crawling up the wall caught my eye…A GIANT spider!
I noticed that the spider only has 5 legs, so I suspect that Chichieto the Cat had his way with this spider before releasing him into our house…
Yeah, we’ve got the punk rockers and the horned tomato worm. Everything has holes in it - parcha, tomatoes, papaya, peppers, calabaza etc. At first I used Neem Oil, but there are too many punkers and the rain (or in our case “dew”) washes it off. I’ve decided that greens are going in the screened shade bed, cherry tomatoes are a better bet than big ones and am rethinking little screened huts for things or MASS plantings like my neighbor does. Cherry tomatoes give you oodles, and unlike my big ones (which I watch daily but know a catepillar could take it out overnight) I know I will harvest them. We’ve got whitefly on the beans and gandules too - lucky us. katrina
You should be cautious with some caterpillars. Lyndsey & I found this one when we were doing time in Texas. It turns out that they have poisonous tips
that will burn any part of your body that touches it for about an hour. In our case it was Lyndsey’s fingers. We learned the hard way that the Io Moth caterpillar can be dangerous. They seam to be attracted to our Passion Flower vine, along with a couple of other ‘Punk Rock’ style caterpillars that were less obtrusive. We captured ours, named him Wormwood, and watched him cocoon.
Yuck! Watch out for those horned worms. I caught them on our tomato plants when they were babies (both the plants and the worms)and they managed to do some good damage. Can’t imagine what one that size would do… Harder to squash too.
Katrina - Yep, the tomatoes seem to be the bugs favorite meal. But, like you said, the cherry tomatoes produced enough for everyone (even the bugs) to have some. Romas did well too. I’m starting some heirloom tomatoes now, so I may have to sleep in the garden to ward off any predators
Ricky - “Wormwood”…haha…that is awesome. I’ve noticed a great deal of the black punk-rock caterpillars on the passion fruit vine as well. I try to avoid the caterpillars and have taken to wearing gardening gloves, just in case.
Miri - Yep, those tomato worms can be a real pain! Luckly I havn’t found any on the tomato plants, YET.