As detailed here in the past, we’d like to keep our yard organic and hopping with life — food plants, flowers, birds, butterflies, earthworms, shrubs, trees. We’re not using chemical fertilizers, weed killers, or pesticides. We are using compost, cow manure, fish emulsion, and blood meal.
Sally Roth’s Attracting Butterflies & Hummingbirds to Your Backyard is a breezy but detailed manual full of charts, diagrams, and helpful illustrations. It’s another fine volume from Rodale Organic Gardening. The Stokes Butterfly Book, by Donald and Lillian Stokes and Ernest Williams, is a thin (96 pages) book with a concise course on butterflies up front, and an identification guide packed with photos, species notes and range maps filling the remaining two-thirds.
Based on my readings, we have planted a couple of small, butterfly-attracting Joe-Pye weed plants in the same bed with our bird-attracting Elderberry bushes, along with some parsley and dill for the butterflies. We’ll be adding Purple Coneflowers, Black-eyed Susans and Butterfly weed next year. Who knows? We may even plant cabbage for the butterflies.
The butterfly’s life cycle is really amazing, what with the transformation from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to adult and all. I never realized how plant-specific butterflies are in laying their eggs. The Monarch butterfly, for instance, only lays its eggs on Milkweed. When the caterpillar is hatched, it goes to work systematically devouring its host plant. In her book, Sally Roth assured me that tattered plants are a small price to pay for the magnificent butterflies that eventually result, and that having played a role in this miraculous process is one of a gardener’s proudest accomplishments.
So it was a warm and organic glow I felt yesterday evening when Amy discovered the reason that our tomato plants had suddenly become shorter, stubbier, and less leafy. It was the beautiful green caterpillar pictured above, almost audibly chomping away and dropping “frass” (fancy butterfly-talk for caterpiller crap) on our cherry tomatoes. O wonder of life! I hurried inside to consult my butterfly books to determine just what kind of caterpillar it was. I couldn’t quite place it, but it did seem to somewhat resemble a Swallowtail, and Amy recalled seeing a large, unusual butterfly in the yard recently.
I could not believe our luck. We were already enjoying the honor of having a Swallowtail caterpillar destroying our tomatoes, and we had not even planted any of its host plants, like Spicebush. In fact, my book said nothing about Swallowtails eating tomatoes, and yet here it was right in front of my macro-focusing lens.
Amy was less thrilled. She would have preferred to see the caterpillar muching my Roma tomatoes instead of her cherries.
This morning, after checking again on our hungry little creature, I did some searching to find out more about the marvel of tomato-loving caterpillars. As it turns out, we cannot expect a gorgeous Swallowtail butterfly. Instead, we would end up with something more like this. Our caterpillar is a Hornworm. It actually appears to be a Tobacco Hornworm, but I’m still calling it a Tomato Hornworm in memory of our poor plant’s leaves.
[Update: According to Wikipedia, ours would be a tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, because of the seven diagonal lines (think “cigarettes”) on its sides, where a tomato hornworm, Manduca quinquemaculata, would have have eight V-shaped (“V-8 juice”) markings.]
Either way, I decided to move the wonderous larva away from our crops. I snipped the denuded tomato branch he was on, and with him still nibbling away, set him down in a place of honor beneath one of our bird feeders. A very happy American Robin found him about ten minutes later.
No chemicals were involved.
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