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Organic Pesticide For Tomatoes: The 5 Best Ways To Protect Your Favorite Vegetable

February 25th, 2010 Posted in Green Living & News

Tomatoes are a tasty addition to hamburgers, sandwiches, salads, and more. Protecting them from insects, diseases, and other animals is a whole lot easier than you would think.

Most of these methods are easy fixes with items you already have laying around your house or garage. So listen up and take some notes because here is the information you need to know to protect your garden today, tomorrow, and forever.

Interested in learning a bit more?

• What To Look Out For
• The 5 Best Ways To Protect Tomatoes

What To Look Out For

So, what do you have to protect your tomatoes from? Well, there’s a lot standing against you, but don’t worry. If you know what to look out for then you’ll tomatoes will live to be eaten another day.

Animals
Rabbits, squirrels, deer, birds, dogs, cats, and a few other animals, will sometimes chow down on your precious tomatoes. Very much like you and your family, these animals see the red color of the tomato and are drawn to it.

They enter through your backyard and often chow down on your unprotected vegetable garden. Rabbits are the animals you are most likely to come across eating your tomatoes, so be weary of their presence on your property.

Disease
There is a whole lot of diseases and fungus’s your tomato can get infected with. The tomato, its stem, its leaves, and its root can all get infected individually. Some of the many diseases your tomato can contract include these fruit disorders Anthracnose, Cloudy Spot, Spotted Wilt, Blossom End Rot, Early Blight, Cottony Leak, Alternaria Canker, Sour Rot, and Black Mold.

Keeping your garden disease free might seem overwhelming with so many diseases out there, but if you follow proper protection practices you will have completely healthy and vibrant tomatoes.

Insects
Most insects don’t mind eating your tomatoes, but there are a select few that specifically go after your beloved fruit. The tomato fruitworm, the beet armyworm, the cutworm, and the leaf miner are all prone to attack tomatoes. The tomatofruitworm is the most common tomato pest.

This species of insect has a little mouth that acts as a siphon for them to eat your tomatoes. These pests hatch on a tomato and then immediately begin to eat the leaves of your tomato. They begin to tunnel through the tomato eating what they can. The tomatofruitworm leaves silk threads and waste all over your tomatoes. How gross is that?

The 5 Best Ways To Protect Tomatoes

1. Cage In Your Garden

   By placing a tall wire mesh fence around your garden you will quickly and easily be able to defend it from all kinds of animals. Simply go to your local hardware store and buy a plain wire mesh. Wrap some wooden or metal poles around the fencing, so you can secure it to the ground of your garden.

   Make sure the fence is tall enough to keep out bigger animals like deer and dogs, but small enough not to allow spaces for squirrels, rabbits, and smaller animals to sneak in through. This is the perfect way to keep your garden protected from all kinds of animals.

2. Attract Owls

Owls are a natural way to protect from predators because they feast upon smaller animals that like to eat your tomatoes. To help attract owls you have to construct your own owl nesting boxes. Construct a wooden box with firewood or supplies purchased cheaply at your local hardware store. Check that the opening of a nest box is no larger than five and a half inches.







The nesting area should be no smaller than 12” x 12” with a depth of 16”. Place wood shavings or chips in the bottom of the cage to ensure a comfortable nest for owls to live, sleep, and raise their young in. Check the box often to ensure other uninvited guests haven’t taken the owls place, like a squirrel or a colony of hornets for instance.


3. Use Sharp Prickly Plants

Another natural way to help keep animals away from your tomatoes is through using plants with prickels and sharp thorns. More discreet than a fence this option requires very little maintenance. Just plant these prickly plants (like echinops, eryngium, cardoon, or euphorbia) to protect your garden from larger predators. The sharp thorns will prick any animals that try to squeeze through, keeping them out of your garden.

4. Organic Pesticides

Organic pesticides are one of the more effective ways to protect your tomatoes from insect and disease all at once. EcoSMART’s organic pesticide are designed to target insects without harming your tomatoes, family, animals, or the environment.

Our organic weed killer is helpful in stopping grass and weeds from hurting your vegetable garden, while our Garden Fungicide is helpful in controlling disease in your roses, flowers, and shrubs. These products are made from all natural ingredients like rosemary oil, thyme oil, and colve oil.

5. Continual Maintenance & Upkeep

One last way to help protect your tomatoes is by making sure you maintain your garden and property. Remove excess debris that gets caught within the confines of your fenced in garden and weed in and around your garden weekly.

This will go a long way towards stopping the spread of disease in your garden because a weed free garden is a happy garden. Also, check your tomatoes and other plants for infection because cutting off the infected section of a plant will sometimes stop the spread of disease.