If you’ve been reading this column from the beginning, you may remember the following installment inspired by my lame attempts at growing tomatoes. It first appeared in August 2015, and was revised for my 2021 essay collection, Going Plaid in a Solid Gray World (Redhawk Publishing).

The hornworm’s relatives were back this summer again, only now I know to keep my eyes peeled daily for the leafless and fruitless portions of tomato plants.

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The dreaded tomato hornworm. Manduca quinquemaculata—a wickedly long name for the gardener’s Enemy Number One. Beware. He has designs on your tomato patch.

One day you have a picture-perfect tomato on the vine. You let it grow one more day, to get a little more juicy, vine-ripened and tasty. And the next morning you wake to see the tomato half eaten, the vine stripped bare. And you know that Hornworm is back.

For several years now I’ve waited, or I’ve forgotten that Perfect Tomato and his relatives grace the raised bed, waiting with their collars tinged with green. I’ll wait a few more hours until they’re fully red, fully ripe. And the next day they are decimated along with the plant that stands as leafless as a miniature cell tower.

Hornworm hangs on the underside of whatever foliage is left, his pudgy green self, swollen to size of my pinkie…no, make that my middle finger. Hornworms average three inches in length.

Get some Sevin dust, you say. Fog the tomato patch, but the point of raising organic tomatoes is to avoid pesticides which is part of the whole reason for growing tomatoes in the first place. I lie in wait, eyes peeled for the devilish Hornworm.

Growing tomatoes successfully is knowing when to harvest before you’re sorry.  The certainty of Hornworm is Murphy’s Law in action. If anything can go wrong, it will. He’s the diner who orders the last piece of pie while you debate, he’s the driver who cuts into the prized parking spot while you dilly dally, the Ticketmaster customer who snaps up the last Paul McCartney ticket the split second before you press “Buy.”

This season will be different, you say.

I know I have said that. As my tomatoes blush into perfect globes, I will check each evening for a nibbled leaf, a sign that Hornworm has dropped by for happy hour.

He has gorged on the equivalent of three trips to the buffet at Golden Corral. Pulling him from the plant in mid-munch will make me shiver. I will don garden gloves because I can’t bear the feel of his prickly little feet.

Hornworms have six segmented “true” legs up hear the head; another 10 stumpy ones with pads that grip leaves like Velcro and a spikey horn on the far end—the part to avoid.

If I’m an early bird, I’ll get the worm.

Carpe diem. I will pick the tomato now, while there’s time.

---Tammy Wilson is a writer who lives near Newton. Contact her at  tym50@bellsouth.net