Who ate our peppers and tomatillos?

HORNWORMS!!! Those little buggers feasted on our harvest.

Our first sighting of a hornworm was munching away on our beautiful Chinese 5 –Color heirloom Peppers. We were bummed out, but removed the hornworms and moved on with our lives.

Then the hornworm got to our purple heirloom tomatillos that lived adjacent to our peppers. This happened when Aaron and I went away for week. We came back to find our prolific tomatillos eaten down to the stem. ALL of them are gone.



Here are two natural solutions to this problem if you are away:


1) Have a friend tend to the garden to keep an eye on the hungry hornworms.

2) Hope and wish and pray that the braconid wasp will prey on the hornworms. You may not need that much luck, but if you are not around to see the wasp arrive, don’t do what we did, use a “life line” and call a friend.




Since we decided on solution number 2 (but the wasps never showed up), here are some facts about the wasp and why you want to leave them to do what they do- EAT THE HORNWORM FROM THE INSIDE OUT!!!!


The braconid wasp lays its eggs inside the hornworm. Once the wasp hatches, it will eat their way out, killing the hornworm in the process. It’s kind of a gross thing to see this happen, but you are better off letting them do their thing because once they hatch there will be enough wasps to keep your garden hornworm free.

Let us know if you had any hornworm experiences and what you did to solve the problem. Next time we will call a friend to help us!