How to Take Care of a Tomato Hornworm Invasion

[Music Playing] Female: Holy cow. That is gross, what is that? You are going to scare your viewers. They are going to need a lot of puppy to overcome that. Eric: So we have been away from the house for a couple of days here. We are just came back and just a few days our tomato plants here have been wiped out almost by this little caterpillar called the tomato hornworm which basically is not little at all. You come to your garden and all of a sudden it looks like you think that the deer have been eating your tomatoes but not really, they are these tomato hornworms will defoliate your entire tomato plant. You can tell you have a problem about you see first of all, there is like literally no leaf left here. The tomato hornworm excrement looks like these little black pellets and they are big. So here, we have some initial damage but the whole plant still has not been nuked yet. This is a Brandywine tomato and I really like Brandywine tomatoes. And if you look around, somewhere on this thing is a tomato hornworm and then lo and behold I found one before and here he is right here. So this is the tomato hornworm and if you see these white things across the top here, he is what is called a parasitized tomato hornworm. There is a tiny wasp that lays it eggs along the spine of the tomato hornworm and that is good thing. So basically the little larvae of the wasp hatch and they burrow into the caterpillar and they eat it and they kill it. So what you want to do here is if you find the tomato hornworm with these white eggs on it is take them and move them to your sacrificial tomato plant because one of my plants is completely almost dead so I am going to move this one over there and he will continue eating and these wasps will have to time to grow because we want more of these wasps around because we want to kill the hornworms. So what we do we just take out scissor and remove that leaf and we will go over here and we will just lay that right in there. Male: Got a little horn on him too, I see. Eric: Yes, it is the hornworm, tomato hornworm. By the way they could be sneaky but this is the hornworm—one of the hornworms that has been defoliating this plant and I just found them. I have been looking at this thing for a half an hour. So what do you do when you find hornworms? They are not hundreds of them, there be three of them, there might be five, there might be 10 but if you take a couple of minutes, you can find them and the best way to do it is just to kill them. You just take them and kill them. Let us do that again. Rolling? Male: Yes. Eric: Okay. So basically we find these guys and kill. So if you come home to your garden, you have been gone for a couple of days. Male: Again-- Eric: Sorry. This is a good example of when you come home from being away a couple of days and you notice that the tops of the tomato plant are being defoliated, you should not go inside and have a cup of coffee, you should go outside, get your scissors and find these hornworms and take care of them because in a matter of days they will just strip all the leaves off this thing. So here is another parasitized one here. So we are going to save this guy and put him on our sacrificial tomato plant. Just lay that right in with the other guy and let those wasps hatch. Female: Look at the horn part of the hornworm. Eric: Yes, it is big one. So if you are just looking around your garden, you cannot necessarily tell that right there is the tomato hornworm and it is because if you just pull back and you are looking in your garden like this, you can barely see him.