Garden-based Learning in Your Own Backyard!

I was in my garden this afternoon doing some heavy-duty weeding after being away at the National Farm to School Conference then the NOFA Conference. The tomato plants were looking sad and over-grown. As I began pulling off dead foliage, I came across this camouflaged little creature:

I had no idea what it was. It looked scary with a big spike on it's rear. We didn't know if it was poisonous or dangerous, so we looked it up on the web and found out that it's a Tomato Hornworm caterpillar.

This is what the Organic Authority website has to say about it:

It’s summer and your garden harvesting is in full swing. While weeding your garden’s tomato bed, you notice a gigantic, horned green caterpillar clinging to one of your beautiful tomato plants.Blech – right? These creepy green monstrosities are unappealing to the eye and deadly to your garden.Tomato hornworms (Manduca quinquemaculata) – also referred to as tobacco hornworms – love tomato plants (they also fancy peppers, eggplants and potatoes) as much as you love organic dark chocolate. The tomato pests chow down on plants producing green fruit and one worm can take down your organic foliage and fruit in one night.

Gracious! What am I to do?? The website said we should squish it and any other we can find or we will have no more tomatoes. My kids wanted to keep it in a butterfly habitat and protested. So I read on:

Call in Tomato Hornworm fighting Friends
Everyone and everything has an enemy. This truth is no different for our garden’s archenemy. Small, parasitic wasps (trichogramma) lay eggs on tomato hornworms' backs that eventually hatch into larvae, create cocoons and eat the hornworm for nourishment. Yes. Nature is gross, but these wasps are essential in ridding your plants of these pesky caterpillars. Never kill a hornworm with small, rice-sized pellets in its back. Let those wasps hatch and naturally rid your garden of these pests.

So... what do you think? I go back in the garden to weed some more, and I find a second hornworm with this:

Isn't nature great!