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To: Paul R.; Qiviut

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.


474 posted on 08/14/2025 3:13:05 PM PDT by Pollard (Gettin' things done)
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To: Pollard; Paul R.; All

You probably know this already, but if you find a parasitized hornworm, leave it. It won’t be munching on your tomato plants & the wasps that hatch will be hornworm hunters.

From link:

Rather than killing a hornworm outright, a female parasitoid wasp injects it with eggs and flies away, leaving her brood to hatch inside the live host. The eggs soon release little wasp larvae, which feed on the hornworm until they’re ready to pupate.

The larvae form cocoons outside the host’s body, and these white projections are easily visible to us. The hornworm is still alive at this point, and may continue walking around, but it has stopped eating. In fact, if you see a hornworm in this predicament, the best way to protect your garden is to just leave it alone.

“If such projections are observed, the hornworms should be left in the garden to allow the adult wasps to emerge,” UMES explains in a fact sheet on hornworms in home gardens. “These wasps kill the hornworms when they emerge from the cocoons and will seek out other hornworms to parasitize.”

https://www.treehugger.com/how-baby-wasps-can-save-your-tomatoes-from-hornworm-caterpillars-4868727


475 posted on 08/14/2025 4:30:03 PM PDT by Qiviut (Imagine waking up in the morning & only having the things you thanked God for yesterday. (S. Peters))
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