The major forage crop host is corn. Elderberry, raspberry, strawberry, gooseberry, and the twigs of peach and plum are fruit hosts. Vegetables attacked include asparagus, bean, eggplant, melon, pepper, potato, rhubarb, and tomato. The twigs of willow, rose, maple, ash, and catalpa may occasionally be tunneled. Larger weeds, such as ragweed, may also serve as hosts to the larger larvae.
Young larvae feed in the stems of grasses, especially bluegrasses and weeds.
The eggs are laid on blades of dead grasses and weeds or in crevices of any suitable debris in weedy areas along edges, hedgerows, etc., especially where grasses and weeds are allowed to grow up in late summer to fall. A female moth may lay up to 2,000 eggs, often in creases of rolled or folded leaves. May. The hatching larvae prefer the stems of grasses, but may also burrow into the leaf veins and petioles of weeds. Once the larvae become too large for this first host, or kill it, they migrate to other plants. When half grown, they prefer the succulent stems of flowers, vegetables, other cultivated plants, and larger weeds.