Planting HELP: Tomato seedlings have their second set of leaves

[summerthyme]

Wow... I have never heard of rodents chewing tomato seedlings. We have a perpetual rat problem here, but the tomato problems don't start until there is actually ripe fruit; the rats otherwise leave the tomato plants alone. (We are building some serious critter cages this year to keep the rats out.)

But this discussion of cutworms reminds me to be sure to turn the soil over well in the beds that I am currently working on (yes, I know, late planting). The first bed that I worked on had a lot of cutworms in it! So thanks!

If you are transplanting, you can prevent cutworm damage by simply placing a small stick )or even a tiny stone, if your soil has them) directly against the stem of the plant while planting. The stick or stone should be partly above and partly below the soil line.

Cutworms must wrap themselves completely around the tender stem of the plant in order to sever it. Thecstick or stone prevents that. And it takes a lot less time and fussing than little cardboard collars.

Summerthyme

 

[Martinhouse]

When I had my big garden, I bought a box of very large nails to use next to seedling stems rather than using sticks. Had to really hunt for them later if I forgot to remove them once the plant got big enough, but I always found them and they sure did work well to prevent those cutworms.

We have something here which I think is called a Greasy Gray Cutworm. It not only severs the stems at the dirt line, it sometimes pulls the top of the plant down into the hole after it eats part of the stem. I've found the few leaves of the seedling all bunched together and barely sticking out of the hole left buy the stem. These worms also would crawl up into a large plant and chew down into a ripening tomato and eat some of the inside flesh. They are fairly easy to find in the ground. When you find the severed top of a plant lying on the ground, just scratch up the soil on a direct line to the next plant in the row and, nine out of ten, you'll find the culprit.

And when the "felled" plant was large enough,, if it was a tomato it could be stuck into a glass of water and roots would grow along the stem and it could go right back when it was originally planted. I would make a clean cut at the bottom of the stem, in case the chewed end left by the cutworm might tend to rot.

 

[summerthyme]

When I had my big garden, I bought a box of very large nails to use next to seedling stems rather than using sticks. Had to really hunt for them later if I forgot to remove them once the plant got big enough, but I always found them and they sure did work well to prevent those cutworms.

We have something here which I think is called a Greasy Gray Cutworm. It not only severs the stems at the dirt line, it sometimes pulls the top of the plant down into the hole after it eats part of the stem. I've found the few leaves of the seedling all bunched together and barely sticking out of the hole left buy the stem. These worms also would crawl up into a large plant and chew down into a ripening tomato and eat some of the inside flesh. They are fairly easy to find in the ground. When you find the severed top of a plant lying on the ground, just scratch up the soil on a direct line to the next plant in the row and, nine out of ten, you'll find the culprit.

And when the "felled" plant was large enough,, if it was a tomato it could be stuck into a glass of water and roots would grow along the stem and it could go right back when it was originally planted. I would make a clean cut at the bottom of the stem, in case the chewed end left by the cutworm might tend to rot.

Thats what I like about using sticks or stones... you don't have to go looking for them to remove them later. Of course, we always had tons of organic trash on the garden soil...

Summerthyme

 

[Martinhouse]

Summerthyme, that's pretty funny! It was the sticks and stones I had to hunt for in my garden, whereas I kept a handful of those nails in a little tin cup on a shelf with the other small gardening things and they were always right there where I needed them. I did try to keep a little pan of small rocks handy there, too, in case I was setting in a plant that just didn't want to stand up on it's own. It could lean on one or two little rocks until it was strong enough to stand on it's own. This was good for tomatoes since I didn't want them developing roots above ground by piling dirt around them to hold them upright and it worked for things like okra that I thought might rot with damp dirt piled up around them.

The soil in my part of Arkansas seemed like crushed rock until I was able to improve it with manure and compost. If my youngest brother hadn't been taking a welding class in high school here, I would have had to buy lots of shovels when I first started my garden. One of those shovels split four inches up into the blade from hitting rocks while turning the soil. And you can imagine what that kind of soil did to a small rototiller.