Anyone with pictures of frost damaged tomato leaves?

[zeroma]

Just wondering if frost damaged tomatoes look like they are brown, burned and dried up right up to the main stem?

Zeroma

[KarenO]

Not my photo but yes, frost kills tender and tropical tomato plants. The damage can range from minor in plants just barely "touched" by frost to complete destruction of all plant tissue right to the ground in a hard frost. Indeterminates will recover from a touch of frost and leaf damage. Determinates can be more severely affected if the growing point is damaged you won't get much if any production.
KarenO

[greenthumbomaha]

I had frost damage last year. The plants looked like wet spinach. I replanted all but a few, and the damaged plants regrew like new. I didn't see anything brown or dried. The damaged parts just looked wilted.

- Lisa

[joseph]

Originally Posted by zeroma

Anyone with pictures of frost damaged tomato leaves?

Is that a trick question? Bwah ha ha! Do I ever have photos of frost damaged tomatoes!

Here's one from a month ago.

[Cole_Robbie]

I always have a lot of volunteer plants in my back yard in late summer from throwing out scraps. I watched a few of them live into late fall. They stop blooming due to the short days. Then, the freezing nights start to nibble at them from the outside inward. The stem is the last to go. The plant is still alive if the stem is upright, even if everything else is dead. New leaves will sprout out of that stem, and a plant will appear. The plant is dead when nothing stands up.

[Gardeneer]

Originally Posted by greenthumbomaha

I had frost damage last year. The plants looked like wet spinach. I replanted all but a few, and the damaged plants regrew like new. I didn't see anything brown or dried. The damaged parts just looked wilted.

- Lisa

That is how initially frost damage/bite looks like.

[zeroma]

Thanks,

Some of the plants looked worse than others, some not touched at all. I mixed up my least favorite liquid fertilizer, Miracle Grow and feed the leaves and stubble. When I first looked at them maybe a week after the night time frost, the dead brown dried leaves looked more like what I would have thought a chemical/fertilizer burn. I would have thought they would look more like melted spinach.

Hoping for the best with a full recovery even though it will set them back some, like so much this spring because of the cool wet weather.

zeroma

[oakley]

Wet spinach is a good description for a light frost. I recently had a seedling tray get whipped with a cold wind. !0 seconds carrying it. 30 seconds may have been doom.
They recovered.
If you put a snipped sucker or a sacrificial seedling in your freezer for 15-20 seconds you'll get the wilted spinach look on the tender leaves. A strong stem might survive. Much longer i bet the entire plant is lost.
It is wet spinach for some time. The cell structure is destroyed but the water content remains, concentrated, until evaporation, then crisp.
We had an early very light frost last Sept followed by two months of nice weather. Basil was toast, the first sign of frost. I picked it within an hour and used it that day.
The summer squash was hit but survived. I removed all the wilted leaves and was about to pull the plants but got side-tracked. They continued to grow and gave another round of fruit. The tomatoes tried to rally but they were a bit spent by that time. It was a confusing Fall season as i was ready to get everything to bed for the winter.