Miserable Manduca Monsters!

On my way out to close the chicken coop this evening I was shocked to see that the nicotiana plant that earlier had been blooming so merrily in the flower box on the deck had suddenly lost all its leaves and blooms. As I looked closer, I could see the cause. FOUR Tobacco hornworms (Manduca sexta) were chomping away, leaving mountains of frass behind (you can see it in the picture- it looks like little blackberries). Not just one or two, mind you, but four of those devils! On one poor little plant! Now I know that the hornworms are very useful in research and that they metamorphose into nice sphinx moths that pollinate night blooming flowers, but I'm just not willing to sacrifice my tomatoes and flowering tobacco plants to the cause. These four, red horns and all, have been dispatched to the great caterpillar resting place. I thought about picking them off and tossing them into the chicken run, but since Sam and Monique had already gone in for the evening, I figured the little devils would crawl out and start in on my tomatoes before the chickens got to them.

Henbit, Henbane and other Poultry Plants

Our yard is covered with lavender/purple flowers, a combination of purple dead nettle and henbit. They look nice in a field, and sport lovely little flowers, as you can see from the henbit(Lamium amplexicaule) pictured here, but they are murder once they invade your garden beds and are next to impossible to eradicate. The henbit got me to wondering where the name came from- why “henbit”? I read somewhere that chickens like the seeds, and I have seen Sam and the girls pecking at it in the yard, but they peck at most anything, so I don’t know…

How many other plants, I wondered, have names referring to poultry? I could think of Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) a very toxic plant whose foliage and seeds contain hyoscyamine, scopolamine and other tropane alkaloids. The name henbane comes from the Anglo Saxon henbanna- “killer of hens.” Needless to say, you won't find any of that in our garden! Then there’s the hen and chicks plant, Echevaria elegans, and the spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum, is sometimes called a hen and chickens plant, too. Lamb’s quarters, Chenopodium album, often referred to as pigweed, is also known as Fat-hen (I have no idea why!). Half the barnyard in one plant! I guess we could throw chickweed in- one of its alternate names is clucken wort- that sounds kind of poultyish to me. I also saw an ad for an Easter Egg plant in a seed catalog- that should probably count, too.

I had a feeling that if I told Sam and the girls about all the poultry plants, Sam was going to crow about gender discrimination and get all upset at not having any rooster plants on the list. So I googled and came up with a vining Rooster flower- Aristolochia labiata, you can see it here.


If you know of any other plants to add to the “Poultry Plant” list, let me know, because I’m still looking.