Chiggers affect my wife very badly too. Sometimes she has a little dark “splotch” from one for over a month, tho’ thankfully the itching goes away sooner. Luckily, our chickens get most of them. “Most” — I have an itch just below my ankle bone, right now...
Worse for us, I had to be away again for a day, and I didn’t find all the tomato hornworms early yesterday: One plant has ONE leaf remaining, stems chewed down a bit, and two forming tomatoes (they would have been about 2” diameter today, I would say, are 1/3 to 1/2 eaten.) No hornworm could be found on that plant (should be easy to spot now!), but an adjacent plant had light damage a big hornworm on it. Another nearby plant had more considerable damage (about 1/2 of foliage gone) and a hornworm “only” about 2-1/2” long on it. (I’m a male with very slightly below average size fingers - still bigger than most women’s fingers.)
To heck with trying to find the dang caterpillars, esp. since I’ll have no chance to use some for fishing bait:
I’ve declared war, WMD style. All nearby tomato plants got a good spraying with Sevin. I’ll hit the rest of the plants early tomorrow morning, when it’s cooler out there.
On a good note, my 3 rescue operation impatiens (12”[?] pots on clearance from Menards for $1 ea.) are all doing well. The best one is, in fact, fantastic now: The plants are deep green and strong, with many vivid flowers (mostly white and a sort of magenta). It seemed dicey when I bought it if it would even survive, but I’m so proud of it, I’ve put it right by the front porch! (North exposure) Hopefully this 97 deg. weather this weekend will not drag it down.
Hornworms
https://giantveggiegardener.com/category/organic-pest-controls/uv-light-for-tomato-hornworms/
They light right up!
I had a couple myself a few weeks ago and might have had a third that I couldn’t find and had forgotten about the UV light at night trick. Not sure and I wasn’t too worried about it. More than 90% of my tomatoes were bad from that biotic condition with cause unknown.
I do still have six maters here and one is one of the few biggest, has little to no blotchy ripening and feels just right to eat. Two plants and bad harvest — still better than store bought, once I learned the hard way that internal whitening of a tomato makes it taste bad. The more blotchy the ripening is, the more chances there are of the whitening.
I got so good at picking out the bad ones that my throwing arm got sore one day.
I don’t think we have chiggers in Michigan. And if we do I don’t want to know. 😜