Marilyn Good, age 10,:
Where does the troublesome tomato worm come from?
Several different kinds of worm may have bitten that troublesome hole in the tomato. For the tomato is considered delicious by more than one of the garden pests. The two most common of these are the, tomato hornworm and the tomato fruit worm.
The hornworm comes from an egg layed by a fair sized moth. You may recognize this moth by its darkish color, chunky body and long slender wings often three or four inches from tip to tip. The eggs hatch into two inch, bright green caterpillars. They wear a stumpy tail and are very bold, often rearing up when approached. In time, these large green caterpillars burrow underground to sleep away their time as large purple pupae. These pupae eventually hatch into moths.
If possible, the tomato fruit worm is far mare of a pest than the hornworm. Among the crop and garden pests he rates as Public Enemy Number One. end, like a real criminal, he has a number of aliases three of them, in fact. He is the corn ear worm and the cotton boll worm as well as the tomato fruit worm.
The mother of this pest is a drab looking moth of less that three quarters of an inch in length. She lays her eggs, a thousand or so of them at a time, in ears of young corn, in tomato fruits and in cotton bolls. The caterpillar, less than two inches of greenish¬brown color, starts to feed as soon as she is hatched. She will tunnel into the tomato, using it as both home and grocery store. She will eat through the cotton boll and fend on the cotton. She will eat the kernels of the growing corn. All told, these creatures spoil and devour a large percentage of our yearly crops,
When she has eaten all she wants of your tomato, the caterpillar drops to the ground and goes into her pupa stage. Like the hornworm, this stage is spent underground. In a short time she hatches into the moth stage and all is set to lay a thousand more eggs. Several generations are hatched in this way every season. When fall comes, those tomato worms in the pupa stage just stay put underground until spring
Chemicals are often sprayed on the tomato vine to combat these insect pests And, since the creature spends the winter as a pupa underground, careful hoeing and weeding of the garden always help to uproot and destroy theme Strange to say, this creature often gives us a hand in her own destruction. You will never find more than one tomato fruit worm in a single tomato or in a single ear of corn. This is because the fierce fellows and their ladies fight to the death any brothers or sisters who might share their food supply even when they can only eat a small part of it themselves.