we use those flashlights to hunt for scorpions

pic doesn't work for me, even after asking to sign up through faceplant

@nctomatoman there.

never got a twitter or instagram account.

I go live every Friday at 3 eastern for 45 min - do demos, answer questions - fun!

I've retired from the road - no more travel speaking trips for me. Going to start doing webinars on Zoom from my office. I am such a home body (esp at our new location!)

this thing has just allowed me to be even more antisocial and hermit-like. grocery store once every week to 10 days, send somebody else to feed and hardware store, and about once a week go do a window visit with an old friend in skilled nursing.

oh and the last couple weeks - some trips to the hospital for rabies shots

in case you didn't catch that story - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181373791

Also sometimes called sphinx moths. But they're beautiful too.

aka hornworm wasp

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can do a lot of damage. They go from tiny to huge and can eat lots of a plant.

Once they have the wasp pupae on their bodies, I leave them.

but i knew you had moved, wasn't sure of the habitat in the mountains..

every time i found hornworm outbreak, i always found 1 with eggs too, so removed others and left that 1 alone ..

btw, PBS played the segment of your tomato fest party recently on 1 of their gardening shows, i suppose it plays every season

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At night after a rain for fishing. I could even sell them for 50 cents/dozen.

They drove me CrAzY before I got my light. Now it's about five minutes each night checking on 16 plants. Gotten over 50 so far this year. The UV light makes them glow so I can get them when they're still small and before they've destroyed much of the plant. The chickens feast on them the next morning. Win/Win

That you may be thinking of slugs...? Hornworms usually target the new growth near the tops of tomato (and pepper) plants...

One summer, my youngest was about 5 or 6 and was into caterpillars in a big way. One day she came home with her two little hands full of tomato hornworms. I told to take a stone and kill them before they got in my garden. I forgot all about it until a few days later and saw that they were eating on my tomato plants. She admitted that she'd let them go in my garden. The way I got rid of them was to get up at the crack of dawn while they were still out. It took a couple of early mornings, but I killed them all.

reminds me of when I used to get up early with my cat and brush slugs into soapy water. Often I would return to bed. She had her own cat door.

I woke up after having gone back to bed after another slug session, and there was my kitty, dropping a slug on my nice, clean sheets.

"Hey you forgot one!"

water and then throw them out where the birds will find them. Back when we had chickens, I would just remove them from the tomato plant with kitchen tongs and throw them into the chicken pen. They went crazy over them.

We have too many critters living here in the woods to have much success with veggies, but I have a few tomato plants in pots this year and all the tomatoes have some sort of damage. A friend said the holes, which look just like what I found when your post made me look up hornworm damage, were from turtle bites. I thought that was silly, but I honestly didn't know if he was kidding or not!

Now I'm going to have to get me a UV flashlight and look for hornworms. (OK, maybe I'll make my husband do it. I'm way too squeamish, which sucks in a gardener.)

I've been fortunate this season...no hornworms at all! I've never used a UV light, but an ordinary LED flashlight works really well, also. It makes the worms "glow" red...