Posted By FarmerJ on October 27, 2008

Last night was our first really hard freeze, so I wanted to tend to the last few plants in the garden.  Saturday was a beautiful day here on the Farmstead, reaching a blissful 71 degrees ~ it sort of made it hard to believe the forecast was calling for 22 degrees the following night.  Oh yeah, we’re in Nebraska now.  Drastic changes in the weather are almost a certainty.

The girls (Abigail and Peanut, Toy Fox Terrorist and Beagle/Shepherd Mix respectively) and I put on our best farmin’ clothes and headed to the garden.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the bell pepper and jalapeno plants had each produced two more peppers.  I sadly bid them farewell and thanked them for the bountiful harvest they had provided throughout the summer.

Abigail was busy tilling certain areas she felt needed attention, while Peanut was hard at work keeping the grasshopper population to a minimum.  Meanwhile, I clipped the asparagus plants back and piled some fresh wood chips on them to help protect them from the inevitable bitter cold that is just around the corner.  During this process, it was confirmed to me why I must always wear gloves while gardening ~ especially when you just dive into the compost pile with your hands rather than a shovel.  It reminded me of the days of Halloween carnivals as a kid.  You know, where you’re blindfolded and made to reach into a bowl of cold, slimy spaghetti noodles and grapes and you get weirded out thinking it’s cranium matter and eyeballs?  I reached into the warm compost pile and pulled out a…well, I don’t know what it was.  But, it was big, round, squishy on the outside and juicy on the inside when it busted open.  Eeew!  My best educated guess leads me to believe it was once a watermelon that had not fared well on the vine.

Thanking the good Lord for pink leather gloves, I commenced to the tomato plants.  These tomato plants were interesting in that they were pathetically scrawny and sickly all summer.  They really didn’t start producing until mid-September, but by then the warm sun had already cooled off quite a bit.  I pulled off what green tomatoes were on the vine, pulled up the wire tomato cages and then began pulling out the plants themselves.  Hmmm, one plant felt peculiarly heavy.  Perhaps I had missed a tomato.  No, all tomatoes had been removed.

Oh my!  It was Larry!  I’d never seen anything like Larry before.  Now, the old me would have done the Willies Wiggle and dropped the tomato vine never to touch it again.  But not this seasoned prairie girl (yeah, right!).  Instead, I set about finding Larry’s brothers, Curly and Moe and their cousin, It.  I found them all on other vines, but I couldn’t shake them off, I couldn’t flick them off, so I pried them off with my little pruning clippers and in the bucket they go, right along with the freshly picked peppers and tomatoes.  Yep, seasoned prairie girl that I am, I just provided them lunch at a 5-star resort.

Now, the photo does these fellas no justice.  These bad boys were b-i-g!  Easily four inches long and an inch in diameter.  Like green Vienna Sausages, only bigger.  I must admit I was entertained for quite some time trying to figure out their front end from their rear end.  I concluded after taking the snapshot above that the end without the big red horn is their front end ~ another educated guess based on Larry and Moe making a beeline for my toes once they heard the digital shutter sound on the camera…I figured their leading end must be their front end.  It’s really a scientific thing, isn’t it?

My research ~ I Googled “big fat green worms on my tomato plants” ~ has taught me that Larry, Curly, Moe and their cousin, It are Tobacco Hornworms, or Manduca Sexta (Linnaeus) for those who don the lab coats.  I compared photos and descriptions, even counted diagonal stripes.  Yes, these are Tobacco, not Tomato, Hornworms.  There are approximately two dozen species of hornworms.  — Although all feed on leaves of various plants, most are innocuous, attracting little attention and causing little, if any, injury to garden plants.  Tomato and tobacco hornworms, which feed on tomatoes and a few related plants, are an exception, being true garden pests.  — That figures.

And, this beautiful creature is what those big green sausages turn into.  Can you believe it?!  It is a White-Lined Sphinx Hummingbird Moth.  Now, I remember admiring the flowers in the largest flower bed one mid-summer evening and seeing one of these hovering around.  They truly are amazing.  At first glance I could have sworn it was a hummingbird.  People actually rear these larvae so they can enjoy the beauty of them as adults.

Never in a million years would I have imagined that amazing creature hovering over my flowers originated from one of these big, green, oozing, overstuffed Vienna Sausages.  Who knew?

I just hope Larry, Curly, Moe and their cousin, It survived their flight without wings as I flung them into the cornfield next door.

Categories: Farm Life, Gardening
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