How to Protect Tomatoes from Tomato Worms

As one who enjoys gardening and also loves to eat tomatoes, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this was my first choice of crop when I completed my square foot garden while living in Humboldt County, Northern California. After all, tomatoes are easy to grow, they are very attractive plants (especially when fruiting) and they smell wonderful. However, I was living on the coast of Humboldt County, and for those not in-the-know when it comes to California’s Northcoast, it’s one of the foggiest places on Earth. Tomatoes need a lot of sunshine. Who figured? I concluded that I would have success only if I grew San Francisco Fog tomatoes, a hybrid specifically designed to grow in the miasmas of Northern California. Before long, I had a garden full of plumping, blushing tomatoes. Naturally, I wanted them vine-ripened, so I left them on the plants until they were ruby red and so swelled with juices they were ready to burst. With my mouth watering ferociously, I went out to cultivate my crop one morning and found that some horrid creature had eaten holes through the center of each and every tomato.

 At first, I blamed the banana slugs and went on a murderous rampage of gastropod destruction. Then I realized that it was actually tomato worms that had decimated my crop—and if any creature on Earth is uglier than a banana slug, it’s a tomato worm (which is actually a caterpillar, but that isn’t important).

 A neighbor told me to plant marigolds around my tomato plants and that they would keep the tomato worms away, so I did and it worked. Unfortunately, the flowers did nothing to discourage banana slugs, who soon discovered the remaining tomatoes.

Another murderous rampage followed, much to the horror of my neighbors. You see, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, the banana slug is highly regarded in Humboldt County. I suppose all of the old hippies that relocated to the area think that having foot long bright yellow slugs devour their gardens is groovy and this sentiment caught on. I can’t say for certain what started this fascination with the ultra-destructive mollusk, but whenever I went on a slug-killing spree, I invariably drew nasty looks from my neighbors. But, as banana slugs are thankfully (or perhaps unfortunately) not on the Endangered Species List, my hippy neighbors were unable to have me arrested for slugocide and had to resort to sneering at me. That’s okay with me, as I’m a master of returning sneers.

 However, my murderous rampage did nothing to protect my tomatoes. Either the slugs outnumbered me by thousands to one, or they reproduced like nobody’s business, for they always returned the next day.

Then, while spilling my woes to my sister, who also loves gardening, she turned me on to the best trick there is to protect tomatoes from virtually everything that might eat them, except for other humans. Her idea was ridiculously easy for her to initiate in her own yard, but for me it involved an embarrassing trip down to the Women’s Notions isle of my neighborhood grocery store.

 Nylon stockings; it’s that simple: you just wrap individual or clusters of tomatoes inside a section of a nylon stocking, tie it off against the stem with a twist tie or rubber band and secure the top with a similar device. The fruit continues to get all the sunlight it needs, it can “breath” to avoid mold formations and as the tomatoes grow, the nylon stretches to accommodate them. Once I adopted this system, I never lost another tomato, not even to the deer that occasionally plundered my garden.