How to stop tomato worms for good

Tomato worms make my skin crawl.

A couple of years ago, I went out to the garden and found that the leaves were stripped off my tomato plants. If you have intact tomato plants one day and just stalks the next, you may have tomato worms.

I have decided to call these pests tomato worms but learned from writing this post that what I had were actually tobacco hornworms and not tomato hornworms. They are related, but tomato hornworms have a distinctive “V” on their body, whereas tobacco hornworms look more striped.

Don’t be confused by the name; this pest roams the entire United States from the southern US to the southern part of Canada. It’s also found in Central America and the Caribbean.

Both tomato and tobacco hornworms love plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, eggplant, and some ornamental plants.

Once you have tomato worms, you might be tempted to use chemicals to kill them, but that’s not necessary.

Once you understand the lifecycle of tomato worms, you’ll understand why this simple method of getting rid of them will also prevent them from coming back.

Lifecycle of tomato worms

To successfully stop tomato worms from returning, you have to break the tomato worm life cycle.

The adult stage of this pest is called hawkmoths or hummingbird moths, but it’s the larval stage, the hornworm, that you’ll probably come into contact with.

The moths deposit one to five eggs on the leaves of the host plant but can lay up to 2000 eggs. The eggs hatch as larvae/caterpillars several days later.

The larvae that hatch go through 5 stages, and these are the ones that eat your plants. And they start eating right after hatching.

They continue to eat and grow to full size in about a month.

Then, they drop into the coil below and become pupae, which is where and how they overwinter, but they can also reemerge in just a couple of weeks for the second round of infestation.

Breaking this cycle is critical to stopping the devastation of your tomato crop.

But, don’t worry, you can stop tomato worms in their tracks, and you can prevent them next year—all for free. Just follow these easy steps.

Stop tomato worms from damaging your tomato plants

Pick the worms off. This is gross, and I can’t do it without gloves because they are HUGE.

However, my ducks thought the worms were the best treat ever. I call that the circle of life.

Prevent damage by tomato worms

It turns out that tomato worms need a clear path to your plant, and a few things will stop them. I’ve used this trick for two years now, and it has worked like a charm.

1. Collect used, empty toilet paper and paper towel rolls.
2. Save your old coffee grounds.

I save both of these all spring in preparation for my tomato gardening in the spring. I plant A LOT of tomatoes.

3. Put an aluminum foil “collar” around the stem of each plant. This makes it difficult for the worms to climb up the plant from the ground.

HOWEVER, MAKE SURE THE LEAVES OF ONE PLANT DO NOT TOUCH ANOTHER OR THE WORMS WILL SIMPLY MOVE FROM PLANT TO PLANT HORIZONTALLY.

4. To make the rolls go further, they can be cut in half horizontally. Make a vertical cut in the roll so you can stretch it around the plant. Force the bottom firmly into the soil.

5. Fill the inner part of the roll with used coffee grounds. I have used coffee grounds on the advice of others. It has cut my infestation by orders of magnitude and I only found a couple of worms last year.

If the coffee grounds are not stopping them, the coffee grounds are at least providing acid and nutrients to the soil.

Other people report that ground eggshells repel tomato worms or stop them from getting to the plants. So, I do that, too.

That’s all there is to it.

Try these easy techniques but make looking for tomato worms a daily task. Happy gardening days are the days no tomato worms are found.

Once you have tomato worms under control and your tomato bounty is back, be sure to try this easy fire-roasted salsa.