Who knew that caterpillars could completely decimate a lovely crop of tomatoes so very quickly?
Especially when you live on the 4th floor!
I suppose we can take comfort in the fact we got to have a couple of fabulous bocconcini, baby spinach, pinenut and tomato salads.
Stupid caterpillars – they are not half so cute when they are eating your lovingly cultivated foods.
Next year we’ll be more prepared.
RIP lovely tomatoes:
ooh, I like your circly trellisy thing
caterpillars destroyed all of my tomato plants too!!! I have some lovely mini rockmelon and watermelon growing though, and my capsicums are doing wonderfully.Down with caterpillars!
I really have to do some investigation so as to prevent this from happening next time around! I can’t believe I used to think The Very Hungry Caterpillar was a lovely book. Trellisy thingies were from Bunnings (I seem to recall that they were rather more expensive than I thought they would be).I wish you more success than we are having with the rest of your plants!
I made a garlic spray to use on mine, which obviously didn’t work. A friend told me to spray them with coffee, of all things. I have some new growth at the bottom of my plants so I’m going to cut them down and encourage the new growth to be the main plant and try the coffee thing!
Damn, having rather a surfeit of garlic at present, I was going to try the garlic spray.Let me know how the coffee goes.<>Something<> is eating my basil too, and ate all of the mango leaves. I may have to break out the chemicals.
On checking my partially dying plants this morning, I’m not sure that the garlic spray *didn’t* eventually work, as the new growth is untouched by caterpillars and I couldn’t find any at all. I think I was just a bit late with it, they kind of took over very quickly. So try the garlic spray! I also have parsley growing underneath the tomato plants, because Jamie Durie said that it helps keep the tomatoes from being eaten.