What's Eating these Tomatoes & Basil?

Howdy - I hope ya'll aren't tired of hearing from me, but I have another issue in my south florida garden.

I have three roma tomatoes with oregano, parsley, and basil surrounding it. I also have some scallion seeds in there, but they haven't sprouted yet.

anyway, was doing my daily inspection of the garden this morning, and noticed holes in my tomatoes. When I bent down for a closer look, I noticed that one of the basil plants also had a few leaves with holes in it.

So far, the parsley and oregano (greek oregano, btw) are fine.

If someone could give me some guidance. I don't even know what to google - "insects that bite holes in tomatoes"???

thanks.

Here's the basil leaf:

snails

It could be very young cabbage loopers or worms-I have found them on my basil-they are the exact shade of green as the leaves, so it will be hard to spot them. Or snails or slugs as aries said. Either should be fairly easy to spot when you look at the under side of the leaves.

that's just it - i've looked under the leaves, and NOTHING...I even sprayed with hose underneath, and nothing fell off.

but i'll google cabbage loopers to get a photo.

It must be a nocturnal feeding insect, which are mainly snails---

I'll go out tonight and see if I can see what's eating my basil & tomatoes.

also - what do i use as a mulch in this bed? I have been calling around looking for pine straw which was recommended in another thread, but no one freaking carries it locally that I can find.

Can i use the 'regular' landscape mulch?

My first thought was slugs.

okay - will throw some diatamacious earth around the basil and tomatoes and get them drunk on beer, too. :)

SoFla, that sounds like a good plan to me! I find baby slugs about 1/2 " long under some of my plants.

now, i just took cleaned out cat food tins, filled them with beer and put them under my tomatoes and basil - I didn't bury the tin in the soil - that okay? they're resting on top.

The top rim of the cans needs to be at soil level. You should see their trails and hopefully find their ugly dead bodies in the beer.

oh. well, then they're gonna have to deal with stale beer tomorrow - it's too chilly to go out into the garden at this time of night to bury the cans....LOL! (well, chilly for south florida).

Well, how did it go?

Well, I had to tackle a different problem - looked like blight or something (leaves all yellow with brown spots), so I was clipping bottom branches. I also clipped some branches off one of the basil that had all the holes in it.

I did lay out the beer - nothing in it come morning.

but I also at the end of the day yesterday put mulch around all the plants, so tomorrow night, i'll dig and get some more tins with beer in them to see how things go.

thanks for asking.

update -

went to my local botanical garden with a sample of my tomato and basil plants, as well as some different plant stems from different beds.

One of them said to use something called dipel to get rid of a fall army worm in my corn. I explained that I was trying to be as organic as possible. They laughed. Loudly. In my face. "well, good luck with that here in florida...let us know how that works out for you".

After I refused to get annoyed or upset with them, and asked them if the issue with tomatoes and the black spots on basil was blight (tomatoes) and mold (basil), they said it actually looked like bacterial spot. He then said to yank the plants up and start over. he said basil was just rotting leaves. I asked if it could be basil don't like 'wet feet'. He said possible. I then explained it's a food garden, and tomatoes had some tomatoes, would the spot affect them, or be dangerous? he said no.

Now, first, I think I caught them off guard when I was undaunted and continued to ask questions. I think they were also caught off guard, thinking I had not researched previously and actually (sort of) knew something about my plants.

They then told me that it's possible, but extremely difficult to garden organically in florida. I told them about friends of mine - one who runs an organic buying club: they purchase only florida grown fruit/veggies, and they are booming. My other friend has an organic farm, and they've aligned with an organic cattleman who green-feeds only his herd, and supplies the farm with organic meat....another business which is booming, so they obviously have the produce, so it's obviously doable....just more time consuming.

I then asked them questions about their master gardening class so I could attend it next year....

I love catching people off guard.


btw - save for some sort of little horned spider who keeps coming back, and a few white squash bugs (which summarily get squished between my fingers), there have been no bugs in my tomato bed. I am spraying every few days with BT, though, as a preventative measure.


....now if I could just get my tomatoes to flower more so I can get more fruit! :)