Worms in tomatoes 🤢
Minnesota gardener here! 🧑🌾 Our tomatoes hang out on our counter until I’m ready to use them. Probably about six times in the past month, I’ve picked one up to find a big hole, a caterpillar/worm and a pile of frass. Obviously, we toss those tomatoes. No big deal. But it’s making me paranoid that we’re eating or preserving lots of tiny caterpillars that are too small for us to notice. Again, this is happening to tomatoes that have been sitting on the counter for several days, so the caterpillar is coming from inside it, not crawling onto it.
Some of the tomatoes have cracks and blemishes, but I don’t see any obvious worm holes. If I tossed imperfect tomatoes, I would have very few tomatoes. (I do try preserve only unblemished tomatoes. And I cut around the cracks when we eat them fresh.)
Has anyone else experienced this? How do you identify which tomatoes might have caterpillars/worms?