More and more gardeners and farmers turn their gardens to organic gardens, and therefore they do not want any uses of pesticides on the gardens. Even though, studies have not shown any significant nutrient difference between the organic and non organic harvests, but the organic harvest have been proven to be healthier for human.
When the gardens are sprayed with pesticides, the human consuming the harvests from the garden will also be consuming part of the chemicals being used as the pesticides and we all know that those chemicals are not friendly. But what if the organic gardens are infected with tomato worms? What should an organic farmer so when they could not any pesticides?
The tomato worms are huge worms that have horns so that they are often called the tomato hornworms. Their sizes are so big that if you have never seen one of them, it may be a surprising experience. They have quite an appetite that they would be able to eat so much that the tomato plants are destroyed. Although they are called worms, but they are actually caterpillars instead of worms. But they are really big caterpillars, as big as four inches long in average. The horns make them look scarier than the other caterpillars, but these horns are nothing but fake horns. These are one of the defense systems against predators and to scare the predators away.
The tomato worms have black or dark green horns. Their sibling, the tobacco horworms, on the other hand, has red horns and this worm also infect tomato plants. So in order to reduce their numbers, use the hues with long handled to cultivate a few inches at the top of the soil around where the plants grew the year before so that you can try to expose the huge brown pupa which came from the tomato worms. The pupa is like the butterfly chrysalis but it has a distinctive feature as it has little handles. This pupa is where the tomato worms spend their winter, a little deeper in the soil so that they will be able to stay warm.
Use companion plants that can attract the miniature wasps. These tiny parasitic wasps are going to lay eggs on the tomato hornworms. When their eggs hatch, there will be wasp larvae on the back of the worms that will serve as protections when these small wasps slowly consume the worms.
