You've prepared the soil, planted the plants, fed and watered them, mulched them, staked, caged or trellised them. You've taken photos of the plants, reported the development of flowers and fruit, and you've watched them like a hawk. You've rushed home after a thunderstorm to find they survived it all, and you are eagerly waiting for those first beautiful tomatoes to ripen up and deliver that delicious home-grown flavor you've been craving. Now what?

Well, everyone loves a ripe tomato. You may find yourself fighting garden pests for each one. We can address individual pests as they occur later in the growing season, but here are a few to watch for.

CUTWORMS: These worms burrow into the soil and cut off your plant stem just below the soil level, at the soil level or even (in the south) somewhat above the soil level. They wrap themselves completely around the stem, so you can thwart their efforts in one of several ways. You can put a cutworm collar completely around the stem of the plant. It needs to extend both down into the soil and up above the soil surface. You can place a stick (a popsicle stick, a twig, 2 or 3 toothpicks, etc.) in the ground right up next to the stem of the plant. There again, the stick or sticks need to go down into the soil about 1" and extend up above the soil surface at least 1". I use toothpicks and put 2 or 3 around each stem.

POTATO BUGS: Usually these hideous little creatures appear first on your potato plants and only move over to your tomatoes later after they have stripped the potato foliage (if left alone and allowed to do so). In case you don't realize it, tomatoes and potatoes are related to one another (compare their foliage and flowers and you can see the obvious resemblance) and the potato bugs, if left uncontrolled, will move to the tomato plants. If you don't know what a potato bug looks like, you can google and look at a photo.

Luckily, potato bugs are clumsy, slow-moving creatures. I usually watch the potatoes like a hawk, and knock the bugs off the foliage by thumping the leaf it is on. Then I step on the potato bugs and squish them. If you don't like getting squished bugs on the bottoms of your shoes, you can carry a bowl of soapy water out to the garden and knock the bugs into the soapy water and let them drown. (The soap coats them and prevents them from getting out of the water and getting away.) If you start seeing potato bugs (or any other bad bugs, for that matter), check the undersides of the potato leaves for eggs. If you find them, remove them and destroy them before they hatch. Potato bugs are easy to control if find them early before the population has a chance to soar.

FLEA BEETLES: These are often a pest on very early tomatoes placed in the ground while both the air and ground are fairly cold. They eat tiny, tiny holes (and many of them) in the lowers leaves of the plant. They usually don't do enough damage to hurt the plant, but the leaves will be unsightly. I don't do anything if I see flea beetle damage (except, perhaps, scold myself for planting a little too early--not that it stops me from doing it) because the plants outgrow it.

APHIDS: There is a period in the spring when the aphids just seem to appear out of thin air and, suddenly, are everywhere. If you don't panic and start spraying a broad-spectrum pesticide that will kill everything (including the good bugs that eat the bad bugs), then the lady bugs will come along a week or two later and begin eating the aphids. In no time at all, the aphids will be gone and the lady bugs will be fat and happy. It is the odd-looking, gray and orange alligator-looking lady bug larvae that eat the aphids, not the more commonly seen adult ladybugs,so don't assume the ladybug larvae are some sort of bad bug. They are GREAT garden helpers.

GRASSHOPPERS: These may or may not be a problem as the number of grasshopppers and the amount of damage they do varies from year to year. Grasshopppers tend to be more troublesome in rural areas where they form large groups and migrate from property to property. The best control is to put out Nolo Bait, an organic control, at the first sign of small (1/4" to 1/2") hoppers. Roaming guineas or chickens will eat them too. (One guinea can eat two pounds of grasshoppers per day.) Wild birds will eat them too, so keeping a bird feeder near the veggie garden can encourage birds to "hang around" and eat bugs as well.

Generally, grasshoppers are only a huge problems once every few years, and normally it is during a drought year.

SNAILS, SLUGS, SOWBUGS AND PILLBUGS: All of these like to climb your plants and snack on tomatoes. Quite often, they chew on the plants and not just on the fruits. They also won't wait for the fruits to ripen, but will eat them while they are still green. Unfortunately, the mulch that keeps down weeds and holds in soil moisture is quite attractive to these pests. The best control I've ever found is an organic iron-phosphate product called Slug-Go. Although it is only labeled for use on snails and slugs, it works equally well in my garden on pillbugs and sowbugs. I usually can find it (or similar products under a different name, one of which is Escar-Go) at Home Depot, Lowe's, nurseries that carry organic products and sometimes at Wal-Mart. You DO NOT want to purchase the chemical product for snail and slug control that contains the toxic substance metaldehyde.

TOMATO HORNWORMS. I have a love-hate thing going on with the tomato hornworms. I used to routinely spray the tomatoes with Bt (a bacteria that kills them and all caterpillars) to kill them, until my then-young son developed a fascination with the sphinx moths that came to visit our night-blooming flowers. Well, how can you plant night-bloomers like nicotiana, moonflower vines, four o'clocks and daturas to attract the moths, and then kill them in their larval form if they appear in the tomato garden?

If you've never seen a tomato hornworm, you just can't imagine how big and ugly they are. They get quite huge as they strip your plants of fruit, foliage and stems and leave ugly green excrement behind as well. They have an ugly horn thing sticking our of one end of them that looks positively lethal. So what's a gardener to do?

Your choice. You can spray your plants with Bt and kill the hornworms if you choose. Keep in mind, though, that Bt will kill ALL the caterpillars that make contact with it, so you won't have butterflies around your yard and garden either. I choose not to use Bt, especially because of the recently dwindling numbers of monarch butteflies.

You can hand-pick the hornworms and squish them, but then you won't have the sphinx moths to enjoy either (you may know the sphinx by one of their common nicknames "hummingbird moth").

You can plant a sacrificial tomato plant (or several of them) in a location away from the main garden and move hornworms from your garden plants to the "extra" plants if you prefer. That is what I do.

I would say you could just ignore them (and you can, if you wish), but a busy hornworm can literally strip an entire mature tomato plant and ruin a lot of almost-ripe tomatoes in a matter of days. Most tomato growers aren't willing to tolerate that kind of damage.

STINK BUGS AND LEAF-FOOTED BUGS: These are my worst tomato pest. The key is to find them and remove them when they start showing up, which is usually in July in my garden. If you get them early, and break their reproductive cycle, you can keep them from getting out of control and damaging your garden. You can hand-pick them or knock them off into a container of soapy water and let them drown, or you can vacuum them off your plants using a cordless hand-held vacuum. Whatever you do, though, DON'T squish them or a horrible stinky smell will pervade your garden. THAT is why they call them stink bugs! lol They damage your tomatoes by piercing the skin. The skin discolors and sours and the flavor of the entire tomato is ruint.

In some parts of the south, these bugs are so pervasive and difficult to control, that gardeners just pull up their spring-planted tomato plants once the stinkbugs arrive, and hope that the bugs will either die or move on before the fall tomato plants provide ripe fruit.

SPIDER MITES: Not that long ago we had a discussion on red spider mites, so I'll only mention them briefly. In general, they are more of a pest in gardens where pesticides are used. Why? Because pesticides kill off all the bugs (including a couple of types of mites that eat spider mites) that prey upon them. Also, spider mites are more of a problem in dry, dusty weather. So, even though in general it is recomended that you keep your tomato foliage dry, it can be beneficial to mist the plants, especially the undersides of the leaves, if spider mites are present in large numbers. Spider mites can and will kill your tomato plants, or damage them to the point that they cannot produce fruit, so you do have to try to get rid of them if they appear in large numbers.

SUCCESSION PLANTING AND SPIDER MITES: If I plant some new tomato plants into the ground in March, April, May and June, the spider mites that appear in June of most years (but sometimes as early as mid-May or as late as mid-August) will attack the March-planted tomatoes first, the April-planted ones next, etc. They always go for the most stressed plants, so keeping your plants well-watered and well-fed helps the plants resist mites. By the way, spider mites love, love, love tomato plants that have been OVERFED, especially those that have been fed lots of nitrogen. So, avoid overfeeding your tomato plants, especially once summer weather arrives.

HARVESTING THE FRUIT: Some people like to pick their tomatoes the moment the green tomatoes show the slightest blush of pink and let them finish ripening inside. Others like to let the fruit ripen entirely on the vine. Some people do a little of both. I prefer to let the fruit ripen as much as possible on the vine, but I don't hesitate to pick them in the blush stage if the birds are getting them, or if a hailstorm is threatening or whatever.

If you leave ripe fruits on the plants to the point that they are overripe, it can slow down the production of more fruit. So, if you want to get the most fruit per plant, harvest often.

Tomatoes aren't ripe just because they have achieved their "ripe" color, whether it is red or black or purple or orange or whatever. If you harvest your fruit too early, it will look ripe, but won't taste ripe! If a fruit looks ripe, feel it. It should have softened slightly. If it is still hard, it isn't ripe enough to eat it.

There are lots of problems that can occur and give you less than "beautiful looking" fruit. Some of these things can be excessive water, which can lead to cracks in the fruit, blossom-end rot, which results from uneven soil moisture, catfacing and zippering, which, while unsightly, don't affect the quality of the fruit. Some varieties are just more prone to cracking or blossom end rot or catfacing or whatever. Sometimes, though, we cause these problems by overwatering or failing to water evenly.

Once your harvest your fruit, eat them promptly and DON'T refrigerate them. If you put a yummy, luscious vine-ripened tomato into the refrigerator, you turn it into a clone of poorly-textured, poor-tasting grocery store tomatoes. And why in the world would you want to do that? Instead, store your tomatoes on a counter out of the sun at normal room temperature. If you are producing more than you can eat, there are ways to deal with the surplus: share them with friends, extended family, neighbors and co-workers, can or juice them, freeze them, make salsa or tomato sauce and either can or freeze it, dry them and then preserve them for later use, or you can make jam, marmalade, chutney and other wonderful things from them.

One great way to preserve cherry, grape, and currant tomatoes is to cut them in half, put them on cookie sheets, and dry them in your oven set at its lowest setting (usually says WARM on the oven dial). Once they are dry and similar in texture to raisins, put them in jars or other airtight containers or in zip-lock bags and freeze them. In the winter months, when the taste of home-grown tomatoes is but a memory, thaw out the frozen dried tomatoes and throw a handful into a salad. You also can use them in any recipe that calls for sun-dried tomatoes.

You can make all kinds of dishes from tomatoes....don't forget fried green tomatoes! You can make relishes and chow chows too. If you need tomato recipes later in the season, I have about a billion of them. One of my friends back in college used to joke that I even put tomatoes in cake and in home-made ice cream. Well, I've never put them into home-made ice cream (yet) but I might if I could figure out how to do it.

FALL TOMATOES: It is wise to plant a second crop of tomatoes, called fall tomatoes, in order to extend the harvest. It is wise, but is it necessary? Well, I think it is. Some years, you CAN carry your spring-planted tomatoes through the long, hot summer and get production out of them in the fall, but it is not a sure thing. If you plant fresh tomatoes in June or early July, they will give you ripe tomatoes in the fall of most years. Every so often, an extra-early first fall freeze will threaten before you get to harvest many, but there's ways to work around that.

EXTENDING THE HARVEST: I plant my spring-planted tomatoes, started indoors from seed the last week in January, beginning in mid-March to mid-April, depending on what the weather is doing.

EARLIEST TOMATOES: I also cheat the season by planting 6 to 8 "early tomatoes" in pots in mid- to late-February. I carry these out into the sunshine on warm days and inside at night until it is warm enough to leave them outside 24/7. The container-grown tomatoes usually give me the first ripe tomato during the last week in April. I DO NOT grow these early ones from seed. Instead, I purchse them in 5" or 6" pots in mid-February as soon as I see them at stores in the D-FW metro area. In order to grow my own tomatoes from seed and get them to a similar size by mid-Feb., I'd have to start the seed in mid-October and manipulate the light and wind conditions indoors artificially to get the huge stems the purchased plants have. I'm just too busy with all the fall and winter holiday stuff to devote that much time and space to raising tomato plants during the holidays.

EARLY TOMATOES: Some of the early-season tomatoes like Early Girl and SunGold will give you fruit roughly 50 days from the time they are transplanted into the garden. So, if I plant them into the ground in mid-March, I can (and often do) harvest ripe fruit before Memorial Day. It is such a thrill!

MAIN CROP TOMATOES: My main crop of full-sized tomatoes, including most of the heirlooms, really kick in and produce ripe fruit beginning in mid-June. With any luck at all, the harvest will last deep into August.

LATE TOMATOES: The later tomatoes, like Brandywine, often do not give me any ripe fruit until late July, but the flavor is well worth waiting for. How long the harvest of these late plants last is largely dependent on weather conditions.

The cherry, grape and currant-sized tomatoes produce all summer long.

The paste and plum tomatoes produce all at once and are usually then "done". I try to time their planting so that the plaste/plum ones ripen later than the main flush of mid-season tomatoes in June and July. It is NOT fun to have too many ripe tomatoes at one time unless you like canning tomatoes all day every day during the hot weather.

As plants of any type decline, you can remove them and replace them with new, fresh plants for fall. OR, you can cut them back to about one-third to one-half their current size, fertilize them well, and hope they will regrow during the hot summer months and then bloom and set fruit in fall's cooler weather.

I do a little of each. Some plants stay healthy and keep producing and I encourage that. However, if a plant looks sickly or if the pests are getting the best of it, I don't hesitate to yank it out and replace it with fresh plants from seed I started in mid- to late-May. (If started in late May, they can go into the ground anytime after mid-June.) If there is a plant that I really like, and I didn't start any of that variety for fall tomatoes, sometimes I'll take cuttings from the healthier topgrowth and root them in water or soil. Then I'll take out the declining plant and replace it with the cutting grown one.

Some years you will get a truly great fall harvest. I remember one fall a few years ago when we didn't have a hard freeze until the week before Christmas. It was a WONDERFUL year for fall tomatoes.

You can grow longkeeping types and store them and still have home-grown tomatoes to eat in the dead of winter.

You can grow very dwarf tomatoes like Red Robin or Yellow Canary or one of the mini-orange ones in containers in a sunny window and have tomatoes all winter long if you really want to.

That's about all I can think of to say about tomatoes, except that writing about them makes me wish I had a fresh home-grown one to eat right now.

And, I know that I did not write a lot about diseases you may encounter with tomato plants, and it was a deliberate decision. There are many diseases and each presents with different symptoms although sometime symptoms are similar. It can be hard to diagnose a specific disease unless you are looking at a picture of the plant's foliage. So, I thought I'd leave a discussion of diseases and their symptoms until we actually start seeing the diseases appearing on our plants.

For those of you who keep saying "you ought to write a book"....here, you got what you asked for....or at least today's four posts, if put together, could be at least a chapter (if not a small book) on tomatoes.

I hope other Oklahoma veggie gardeners/tomato growers will add to what I've written. There is so much that I still don't know about growing tomatoes and we need for everyone to share their experiences and knowlege so we all can benefit from it.

Finally, my worst tomato problem used to be Early Blight and then I wrote endlessly about tomatoes and didn't even mention EB. How odd is that? Well, someone else can write about it if they want. After fighting EB all these years, and basically having gotten to the point where it isn't much of a problem any more, I just don't even want to think about it.

And, why am I not out in the yard or garden? Oh, well, I have the flu.....so am stuck inside with the aches and pains and general malaise. It is a lovely day outside, though, and I'd rather be outside playing in the dirt!

Dawn