A Fearsome Predator

I mentioned before how much I enjoy visiting with my tomato plants in the morning and now I must admit that I spend a bit of time with them in the evenings too. The other night I had done my deck time and was inside making dinner when Vince came in to tell me that something had attacked the tomatoes and eaten a bunch of the foliage. It was literally about 15 minutes since I had checked on them but darned if he wasn't right. Three branches on my Early Girl plant had been eaten down to nubs and one on the Beefmaster had been consumed.

I didn't think it could have been deer although they have been known to walk right up onto the deck if there's something they deem tasty enough for the effort (like my basil plants last summer), especially since they would have had to walk past two other plants to get to the ones that had been consumed. One thing we noticed, though, was little black things all over the deck around the involved pots. That's when it hit me, it had to be tomato hornworms.

With JiaJia's assistance, we rounded up five of the little monsters and threw them in the trash can. Believe it or not, even though I smushed them and wrapped them in tissue, two of them survived and escaped later on. Thankfully Vince saw them and dispatched them off to the great tomato plant in the sky.

And the tomatoes live on for another day...