ON THE WING

Jill Dinsmore

"The Land of Nursery Rhymes"

June brings tulips, lillies, roses,

Fills the children’s hands with posies.

Last Monday was garden club, along with the normal AM work schedule – lunch – and then the meeting at 12:30.

On the way home we also tend to the garden of our dear friends - one 90 years young and the other (if she makes it 6 more months, she says) will be 100 – and a founding club member at that!

We have planted, among a row of hollyhocks, a few tomato plants earlier this spring, along with a cucumber, zucchini, peppers and 1 lone Roma in the raised bed outside the porch with the geraniums. So every month we do what needs to be done after the meeting. This time we noticed the leaves were stripped from this plant and on closer inspection,            we found a HUGE green caterpillar with horns sticking up on its rear. Huge, he was 3 – 4 inches long, gorging himself ready to pupate (he’d already demolished almost ¼ of the plant). We took him on his leaf, added several others and left him inside the fence under a bush and hoped he would make it – since it takes about one month for this process to occur.                          

                            

 

 

 

 

 

The tomato hornworm is the larva of the Five Spotted Hawk moth, a member of over 100 species of the Sphinx moths in the US. These moths feed on deep throated flowers, such as petunias, trumpet vine, and nicotiana. They are powerful fliers and are sometimes called the hummingbird moth because they can hover while feeding.

They are dark gray, mottled with black and light gray. Five pairs of yellow spots on each side of the abdomen and wing span of 4 – 5 inches. Their enemy is the Braconid wasp parasite which lay their eggs in the living caterpillar, which the wasp larva then eats – recognizable by the white cocoons covering them. After the caterpillars gorge themselves, they burrow in to the ground to pupate over winter. In May – June the adult moth appears and the cycle begins once again.