garden visitor

I went to our community garden plot yesterday to check on our remaining crops. I picked a few hot peppers, a handful of bell peppers, and checked on the status of our remaining squash and tomatillo crop.

Then I saw him, clinging to a branch of the mostly-dead portion of the sprawling tomatillo plant: Manduca sexta, also known as the tobacco hornworm.

As sprite noted last week, it looks like something out of a Lewis Carrol book: a huge caterpillar, perched on a branch, daring you to challenge its dominance. This specimen is more than three inches long, and quite well-fed (many tomatillos from the withering branch likely contributed to his ever-growing girth).

I just hope he’s happy with the branch he’s on now, because we have a decent number of healthy tomatillos that need a couple more weeks on the vine before they’re ready to harvest.