my tomatoes! =( help!!!

welp, i hadn't kept a close eye on the maters this summer.... but we spied a few the right color so we went to harvest a few. only to find they'd been gobbled like mad by some horrid creature of the dirt!!!!! every freakin ripe tomato had deap empty rotting holes burrowed into them!!! i coulda yacked all over. so every ripe one was already pulled off the vine and most of the unripened ones on the one plant are also already burrowed into and ruined. we' ve got one plant thats 80% okay still but some of em are still gettin hit. so does anyone know if these are just slugs or some sort of worm? i did see some sorta reddish colored larva under one of the plants. is there anything we can put on it to save a few... sheeet i don't even care if its organic at this point. helllllllp thanks guys!!
francie

 

Don't know what's eating your 'maters. Here are a few places to start looking, depending on what part of the country (assuming U.S.) you are in:


http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC2218.htm
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CoopExt/4DMG/Pests/tompests.htm
http://www.northerngardening.com/tomatoes.htm
http://ipm.ncsu.edu/AG295/html/tomato_key.htm

A couple of bigger, more general and REALLY good ones are:
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/selectnewpest.tomatoes.html
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/tomato.html

I think that the attra.org is something all gardeners/farmers/folks in the country should check out.

WHAT IS ATTRA? National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, funded by the US Department of Agriculture, is managed by the National Center for Appropriate Technology. It provides information and other technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, Extension agents, educators, and others involved in sustainable agriculture in the United States.


Also, get some samples of the damage and larvae, and take them to your local county agent. Free, local, expert (usually) advise is hard to beat.

 

that happened to me last year seeing that THere was alot of rain
more than this year.

But this year i am eating a bounty of beautiful ORGANIC tomatoes

 

some bugs have been drilling right thru my tomatoes as well. it seems the pop as soon as the suckers are ripe, ive seen a decrease in them showing up by keeping the tomatoes moist and watching the tomatoe like a hawk. something else you might try is getting the tomatoes before it's completely ripe and taking it inside and put it on a window to let the sun ripe it.

 

Horticultural lime. It's pulverized limestone. About $3.00 for 50 pounds at a garden center. twice a season i take handfulls and toss it all over the garden . it leaves a dust on the fruit and leaves. Not harmful to the enviroment or humans. I haven't had a problem with worms eating my tomatoes since doing this. they start chewing away and get a mouthful of the stuff and die.

 

thank you guys so much!!!! so far i've rescued about 4 of the tomatoes from the buggers. i'll give the lyme a try and keep the plants moist. just teaches me the lesson to never ignore my plants for that long.

 

Those big fatass tomato hornworms have gone nuts here this year, everyday I pull at least 3-4 off my plants.They have voracious appetites.

They sure make beautiful butterflies though and I save them in a big pickle jar till Sundays when Larry leaves to go back out of town and I make him take them down the road where there is a big field with a bunch of milkweed plants and dump them there.

I can't stand to kill anything except roaches,flies and mosquitoes.
I save all my spiders that make it in the house and put them out in the garden, Larry thinks I'm nuts...but he loves me anyway.

 

sorry to hear bout yer maters