What’s That Bug on My Tomato?
By Kira Hamman
Oh yeah, they’re here.
With the first tiny green gems come the first yucky crawly bugs.
When I see them, my ears ring with the Harry Potter character’s motto – CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Noticing the buggys early and staying on top of them is most of the battle when it comes to organic pest control. But knowing which ones you’re dealing with helps, too, and to that end we provide this primer of tomato pests:
Tomato Fruitworms
These little guys do a lot of damage to both fruit and leaves. If you see distorted leaves or holes in the stem ends of green fruit, you may have fruitworms.
Tomato Hornworms & Tobacco Hornworms
Oooh, I hate these guys. They strip the leaves off plants and sometimes even get started on the fruits. When they grow up they become huge moths, which is kind of cool, but not cool enough to warrant killing my tomatoes.
Aphids
If you have a garden, you’ve probably seen aphids. They try to trick you by coming in a multitude of colors (I’ve seen black, green, and several shades of brown in my garden alone), but they’re the same life-sucking pests. They attach to the stem of a plant and suck its juice out, making it wither and, in extreme cases, die. They’re easy to miss if you don’t look carefully.
Stinkbugs
These guys do a particularly gross kind of damage: they prick the fruits with their pointy mouth parts, leaving dark spots surrounded by lighter areas. These areas turn mushy and spongy as the tomato matures, so that when you slice the fruit you may not really want to eat it. Like aphids, stinkbugs try to trick you by coming in more than one color (green and brown) and several body types.
Next week: what to do about them!
July 29th, 2008 at 11:49 am
And as my hubby asks: “Where the heck do they come from?” I mean, you never see a tomato hornworm ::shudder:: until there are tomatoes…never see a potato bug until the pototoes are well established. Do they lie dormant until their plant-of-choice radar alerts them? Bizarre. And ugly!
July 29th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
As a matter of fact, Nancy, that’s exactly what they do! In yet another miracle of evolution, the buggies are biologically timed to emerge exactly when their food source appears. Very cool in the abstract; very annoying in practice!
August 7th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Can you help us identify this bug that is killing our tomatoe plants? It is very tiny, white, multi-legged (maybe 6 legs - too small to determine), goes in and hollows out the root and stem of the tomatoe plants…
August 8th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Patricia - Do you have a photo of the bugs? Are they flying around, or are they attached to the plant, or something else? If they’re flying, they might be whiteflies. If they’re attached, they might be wooly aphids. Neither of those will bother the roots, though, so I’m not sure what you have.