NIMBY … an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard”, a phrase often used to show the displeasure of something, typically environmentally, about to occur near a residential area. In this case, it relates to finding some Tomato Horn Worms beginning to devour my tomato plants!
I planted 8 tomato plants this year, the first time I planted them in about 10 years. Typically, I am on the road so much in the summer that the plants always burned up while I was traveling. But this year, with little summer travel planned, I decided to plant some of my favorite food/snack items … I LOOOOOOOOVE fresh tomatoes!
Well, one of the 8 plants was destroyed by a raccoon (you might remember the post I published after I trapped and relocated this masked bandit), and everything was going great. That is, until I walked out the other morning and found several of the plants literally being eaten up! A closer look showed there were 6 Tomato Horn Worms busy feeding on the plants.
I certainly didn’t want to kill these large caterpillars. After all, they are the precursor to beautiful moths in the hummingbird moth family! What is one to do in this case? Well, my answer is to pick the caterpillars off all the plants and then relocate them to a single tomato plant (the one I find to be damaged the most) and let them live out their lives on that plant. After I relocated the cats, I captured a few images:
Here is my collection of horn worms on my “Sacrificial Lamb” tomato plant:
Now, I’m down to 6 plants! From now on, I’ll have to keep a close eye on the plants to assure I don’t get more of these hungry critters on my beloved tomato plants!
Photographic Equipment Used:
- Canon 5D Mark 3 body
- Canon 180mm f/3.5 macro lens
- Handheld
- ISO 400
- Aperture f/3.5 to f/13
- Shutter 1/125 sec. to 1/30 sec.