Tracie pleads for help with stinkbugs on tomatoes:
Seven years ago, my husband and I planted 16 tomato plants we started from seed (3 different varieties). We used 3 square foot gardens. They flourished….except….every single fruit got infested with stinkbugs! We weren’t able to harvest a single tomato, and there were lots.
We tried everything; planting marigolds and sunflowers, using Sevin in both powder and liquid form, putting bright colored items in a perimeter surrounding them (not too close). The only thing we didn’t try, mainly because I’d given up by this point, were pheromones and traps.
I was so discouraged that I completely gave up on gardening. However, my wonderful husband of 27 years just passed away. He was our only income earner at the time so until I can find a job I’m living on his survivor benefits and life insurance. Thus, I have renewed my determination to have a survival garden (or Victory Garden, as my wonderful husband and I called it).
But before I plant a single bed I MUST get ahead of the freaking stinkbugs! I hate those little monsters! Please tell me you know what to do 🙏??!
Oh, I live in Spring Hill on the Pasco County side, 1 mile south of the Pasco/Hernando county line. Technically I’m in 9b but I’ve been told by a nursery, right on County Line Rd, that I’m really smack dab on the border of 9a/9b.
Can you please help me? Thank you!
I’m guessing Tracie did not read my book Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening, in which I write:
“If there’s a Holy Grail of vegetable gardening… it has to be the tomato.
Armies of fervent gardeners fight to grow this succulent fruit. Seed catalogs devote multiple pages to exotic varieties ranging from black-fleshed beefsteaks to tart yellow Romas. Home improvement stores roll out racks of rich green young seedlings in perfect six-packs…
Yet, tomatoes are not for me. Here I am… a garden teacher… writer… genius.
And a failure at tomatoes. At least in this climate.
From the fringe of outer darkness I stare inwards, picturing happy gardeners fondling supple fruits hanging in golden sunshine; lush tomatoes, untouched by stinkbugs… plump and sweet without a hint of blossom end rot…
The temptation to try again is overwhelming.
But… the pain… oh… the pain.
Ave Solanum, Solanum lycopersicum…
It wasn’t always like this, you know.
There was a year where tomatoes grew well for me… unfortunately, I was in Tennessee at the time. Tomatoes loved the rich clay and deep mulch of my beds (though they still rejected much of my trellising efforts, preferring to twine about on the ground like overzealous revelers ejected from a Bacchanal) and rewarded me for my efforts by producing enough fruit for us to eat fresh and even jar up some homemade tomato sauce on the side.
Sadly for my tomato-growing career, now I live in North Florida… and have proven again and again that gardening methods that work in one place don’t necessarily carry over to another.”
Since writing that back in 2015, however, I have done some more experiments with tomatoes. We haven’t figured out how to wipe out stink bugs, but we did find that Carbon, Heatmaster, and Everglades tomatoes all do decently in the heat and with diseases.
The truth is, Florida is a bad place to grow tomatoes. They just aren’t well adapted. The heat, the diseases, the bugs, the swing from cool to hot weather, the torrential rains: all lead to less than exemplary tomato growth. You may get lucky some years, but it’s a constant fight. The only tomatoes that do well consistently are Everglades and some other cherry types.
My friend Mart once put mosquito netting over a tomato bed to keep out the stink bugs, so that might be worth trying. It worked for him, but is too much trouble for me.
If you get your tomatoes in the ground early – and stick to mostly determinate types – you might get a decent harvest before the weather knocks them out. Good watering and rich soil with lots of compost helps. A couple of local gardeners here in Lower Alabama recommend Amelia as a good variety. I have not tried it yet.
Yet remember: no matter how good the variety, the stink bugs and the leaf-footed bugs are always waiting. Once it gets a little warmer, they start showing up in droves and are very hard to control, so I don’t even bother anymore. I just say “season’s over!” and plant something else.
That is my two cents. We usually spend more of our effort on growing crops that do better than tomatoes, like hot peppers, sweet potatoes, Seminole pumpkins, collards, longevity spinach, cassava, true yams and okra.
Good luck – and my condolences on the loss of your husband. Glad you are still gardening. Don’t give up, even if your tomatoes do.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
13 comments
Can I offer one other suggestion? I have trouble with squash bugs. During lockdown of 2020 I was home all the time and had my best harvest because I checked the leaves everyday for squash bug eggs, destroying them before they hatched.
In 2021 I had a decent harvest but it was obvious I was missing some egg masses and lost some of my plants.
I live in Texas which means we have a long growing season, so I planted a few squash seeds in pots and moved them closer to my house. Although they didn’t produce as many squashes, they weren’t bothered by squash bugs.
While my tomatoes do well here, every year I grow a couple of tomatoes in pots close to the house as part of my kitchen garden. Not only are they handy, but I usually overwinter them under grow lights and put them out in the garden the following spring.
PS Thank you for your blog. Since I found you, I read you faithfully.
you can also try a green variety( you pick when green), seems like the stink bugs are attracted to the red color
South Marion County here; I agree with trying FL Everglades tomatoes. They are the only ones the stink bugs and hornworms completely ignored last year. Plus I now have volunteer plants coming up all over the place, and they are even starting to fruit already, in January! I am attempting to grow other varieties anyway; the roma-type I planted in September is actually doing quite well because of the mild winter since the bugs haven’t shown up yet. I covered them one night for frost but other than that I haven’t had to do anything. The tomatoes are starting to ripen now. So maybe you’d have better luck with fall tomatoes? I’ve never had that much success with spring or summer tomatoes other than the FL Everglades.
It is so very sad to me that you cannot grow tomatoes in Florida! Gasp. I do not know how I could garden without them. I interesting how just a zone or so away can change everything. My main take away though is ALWAYS ALWAYS stake them for less disease and bugginess( really unclear on that spelling). Will starting seeds very soon. That is what works in my area.
Tulle….the fine mesh net fabric you can get at the fabric store to make tutus with may help you. It’s cheap and easy to find and can be reused every season. Grow your tomato in a cage of sorts or up a stake or single twine from overhead. Loosely wrap, with leaving extra tulle for the plant to grow into, over the whole tomato plant and use clothes pins or binder clips to hold the tulle on. As the plant grows, you can loosen the tulle to tie it up and then rewrap it. Use more tulle as needed. Tomatoes pollinate with wind and shaking, so don’t worry if the flowers are covered. As soon as you see the first blush of ripening, you can pick the mostly unripe tomato and let it finish on a window sill inside and still get that sun flavor. Less chance for the nasty bugs to get to your long awaited tomatoes. Here we have assassin bugs on the tomatoes that do the same damage and this keeps them off. If you are up to hand pollinating squash, you can use the tulle on them too. Wrap the stems with wide strips, bunched up to stop the vine borers. When garden season is done, unwrap the tulle, give it a swish through soapy water, hang to dry with one of the clothespins, then store in a box or bag (I use a tote box) until next season. Hope that helps…Alabama, zone 7B
Stink bugs come and go; if you haven’t grown tomatoes in a few years it will probably take them a while to find you again. David is right (of course!) – the secret to success is (1) growing the right varieties and (2) timing. I’m in Orlando and Mountain Magic is my most reliable tomato year after year. Lots of cocktail-type tomatoes that are just big enough to slice and layer on a sandwich, but small and numerous enough to escape total destruction from various pests. It is also late blight resistant. Two plants give me the equivalent of one of those $5 plastic containers of Campari tomatoes a week. Plant seeds now (mid-January) for spring and they should bear into June. Remove the plants in June/July (that’s our winter!) to get rid of bugs and disease. Plant seeds again in early August for fall. You must, MUST protect the fall seedlings from summer rains; I use a clear plastic serving tray on a little pvc pipe frame to make a roof for my seedling tray. The fall plants should bear all winter. Remove them before putting out spring seedlings, again to clear out pests and disease.
Unfortunately, getting the right varieties for persnickety Central FL generally means having to start your own seeds. Other varieties that do well for me are Plum Regal, Bella Rosa, and Everglades (although the last two are not late blight resistant).
Also, if you like tomatillos, they are really easy to grow here, just be sure you have more than one plant close together as they like to cross-pollinate.
If you are really, REALLY into growing tomatoes in Central FL, here are some lessons learned I wrote up for friends – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eymcS7tbEG-TH2VCeoA1bgOKJHTUesolg3wTpJl4Tzo/edit?usp=sharing
Growing in Florida is totally backwards from growing anywhere else. I’ve always had the best luck starting my tomato seedlings late August early September. By the time the plants are mature the bugs are nowhere around. Hope this helps
Thank you. I DID read your book actually. I also saw a talk you gave a couple of years ago mentioning Everglades. However, I can’t find them anywhere, either in seed or plant form. I know you don’t recommend tomatoes in Florida, per se, but I was hoping you could offer ideas on stinkbugs. I did buy mosquito netting already, I’ll try that until I can find Everglades.
Also, thank you to the person who suggested winter/fall tomatoes. I’ll try that also.
Please email me your address – we’ll get you some Everglades seeds.
Awesome!! Thank you!!
I fight this battle every year. I’m not sure why anymore, to be honest. I’d love to grow tomatoes but I can’t spend all day swatting bugs or smashing them off of my tomatoes. Spraying doesn’t seem to work and you run the risk of harming pollinators instead. It’s frustrating, to say the least. I’ll be trying the everglades tomatoes this year and perhaps yellow pear and some cherry varieties again. Any slicer size tomato I try ends up feeding the little monsters instead of us.
I’m Italian so it is my family duty to grow tomatoes!
I am in South Florida in zone 10b…not the best place for tomatoes, but I have had great success, but you need to follow some basic rules:
1) Growing season is Sept-May (last harvest) Your microclimate might be able to push the zone and get an extra month, but if you stay in this window you should be ok. Outside of this timframe you can grow everglades…
2) Select the right breeds. I grow a lot of tomatoes from the university of hawaii agricultural school. Not unlike UF, they have a great AG department and have a seed program. They have developed several tomatoes to resist all the same issue that we have here in Florida (nematodes and etc.resistance). Their smaller type, but performers. Plus there cheap…only $1.50 per pack.. https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/seed/
My best “beefsteak” type are two breeds of a red and an orange heirloom something. Seeds from a great tasting tomato from some store that my mom ate and saved the seeds and I planted them out to “see what would happen”….and now this is “my breed”… (in fact they started as a red…the orange version came from the past genetics. ) I’m trying Homestead this year as I heard they do ok…also heard Carbon, but I could not find seeds.
3)Start from seed! Tomatoes are so easy to start from seed and you get stronger plants. I “landraced” these beefsteak heirlooms,and I now have red and and orange beefsteak tomato that grow great in my soil conditions and free plants for life. Also the starts in the stores, besides not knowing how they will perform, are jacked up on so much fertilizer their not natural and are weaker in the end.
4) Don’t be afraid of containers. Yes it costs a bit to fill them up, but you can reuse it over by amending. I am using 20gal grow bags and even doing indeterminant with a single leader with 2 plants in one bag. Helps stay away from the nematodes.
5) If you grow in the ground amend deep. Tomatoes can have a tap root that goes 5 foot deep. We have sugar sand in South florida…as you dig deeper the sand just changes colors from grey, white and even orange…not nutritious. Amend at least 2 foot down before planting. If you live on a lake plant close to the water table. I plant about 4-5 foot from the shore and you can tell when the tap root finds the water…grows exponentially.
6) Protect the fruit….everything else here wants to eat them as well. I usually dont have bug issues, but birds, rats, possums, racoon, squirrels, iguanas and more. I live on a lake, so i get more wildlife than a normal, so I have designed some elaborate solutions to protect my annual gardens.
Does take some extra effort…but as noted…I am obligated to find solutions
Thank you, everyone!
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