5 Reasons To Grow Marigolds With Your Tomato Plants
1. Marigolds attract bees and other tomato benefiting insects.
Who doesn’t love beautiful butterflies, bees, ladybugs, and other beneficial little beasts that visit the tomato garden?
Great to aid pollination, yes! Not only that, many of the insects that marigolds attract help to keep insect pests at bay such as aphids and caterpillars.
2. Marigolds act as a “trap crop” for slugs and snails.
Plant a row of marigolds surrounding your tomato plants and slugs and snails will never venture beyond the tasty foliage of your marigolds.
Slugs and snails love tomatoes. You may not even know they are there until you go to pick your juicy plump fruit. Then you find soft, squishy holes and the tell-tale slim trails left by these nocturnal robbers.
Luckily, they like marigolds even more making marigolds an effective “trap crop” for slugs and snails. The airy, fern-like marigold foliage make early morning search and destroy slug and snail hunting a breeze.
3. Marigolds deter animal tomato pests.
The strong odors that marigold plants make often deter other garden pests such as rabbits, deer, cats, and snakes. Okay, I don’t know that snakes eat tomatoes, but they can stay out of the veggie patch, as far as I’m concerned.
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4. Marigolds help to keep soil healthy.
For the agricultural and home tomato grower, root knot nematodes can plague the tomato plants. They also bother some of their nightshade relatives such as peppers and eggplant.
Marigolds are extremely useful in this scenario. They trap and kill parasitic root knot nematodes. Plant marigolds thoroughly in areas known to be infested. Toxins in marigold roots seem to kill the nematode before it grows and reproduces.
5. Marigolds deter tomato worms.
Tomato hornworm eating tomato
There are many worms and caterpillars that love tomatoes. Large moths begin their life as the dreaded Tomato Hornworm.
The way marigolds help deter these pests is twofold.
First, their strong odor is thought to repel the moths, deterring them from laying eggs. Secondly, marigolds attract many beneficial insects including parasitic wasps which are harmful predators to tomato hornworms and other nuisance worms and caterpillars.
Tomato hornworm infested with parasitic wasp larvae
