By Tamara Galbraith

It's mid-summer, your tomato plants are humming along and even starting to bear fruit. Then one day while checking your toms, you notice lots of leaves in the middle and bottom of the plant are either munched or totally gone. Your tomatoes themselves might even show damage. What happened?

You've probably unknowingly provided a four-star restaurant for a large caterpillar known as the tomato hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata). This chubby, ever-hungry garden pest is generally green, with several V-shaped marks down its back, and a blue/black "horn" on the tail.

Hornworms can be controlled with any organic pesticide formulated for caterpillar control such as Green Light Spinosad. Hand-picking and dropping into a bucket of soapy water is also good if it doesn't freak you out to handle them (wear gloves, though). However, if it looks as if they are covered with bits of rice, please leave them - those are the cocoons of the braconid wasp pupae. When the wasps emerge from their cocoons they'll get rid of your hornworms for you - and breed more hornworm killers.

Try keeping one or two hornworms, though, and put them in a jar with holes punched in the lid and some leaves for food until they pupate. Hornworms are the larvae of a rather fascinating moth. Watching this fat ugly caterpillar turn into a lovely creature over the course of a couple of weeks is a great experience for gardeners young and old. Once they reach the moth stage, they are no longer a direct threat to plant health and can be set free (but let them go somewhere away from your tomato plants - since they will otherwise lay eggs on your plants and start the cycle all over again).

Green Light Spinosad kills insects & can be used on vegetables, fruits, lawns & ornamentals. Controls worms (caterpillars) & other insects. No odor, kills targeted insects within hours. Non-staining. Not harmful to beneficial insects.

The rose slug can visit your garden every year in early summer and destroy your rose leaves. The leaves have hundreds of holes and brown spots and look just awful (unless you like the brown lace effect). But when you look for the cause, you often don't see anything.

The culprit is the rose slug, the larval stage of a sawfly insect. The larva turns into a pupa, overwintering in the soil and emerging in spring as a sawfly to lay eggs on your rose leaves. The eggs hatch out into little green larvae that look a bit like caterpillars. They eat like crazy and then disappear. Most varieties have only one cycle but they can do lots of damage in a short period of time.

You can get rid of this problem by hand-picking the critters or by using Spinosad.

Take advantage of the warm summer days to plant frost-tender shrubs and trees, such as palms, bananas, bougainvilleas and hibiscus.

These are great additions to the garden as long as they are properly placed. Select a location that receives half to full day sun. A bit of frost protection, such as a wall or a corner by a fence, is best to help prevent frost kill next winter. Almost all of these subtropical plants love as much heat as possible.

Plant using equal amounts of Master Nursery Bumper Crop Planting Mix and native soil. Blending the mix with some soil is much better than replacing the total volume of soil. This blending provides a gradient to allow the roots to acclimate and grow easily into the native soil. Plant so that the root ball is 1” above the surrounding soil.

Cover this exposed soil with compost or planting mix. In a short amount of time, the hole will settle to the correct depth. Keep moist for the first 6 to 8 weeks.

Your new plant will need more frequent watering than the existing ones.