Severe Leaf Curl...is it over??? :(

[b54red]

Carolyn I raise all of my plants myself from seed and I have never seen anything like this before but the plants are definitely recovering except for about 10 or 15 % of them. The photo in the above post is one of the worst that is still surviving.

This stuff hit my plants overnight after a rain. It was scattered but damaged the seedlings set on a table hardening off the worst but it also hit a bunch of my plants that had been out in the garden. Some of the plants in the garden were over 4 ft tall and had been in the ground since March 16. The ones affected the worst in the ground were the more recent planted ones and particularly in one bed that was away from all the others but nearer to the hardening seedlings.

Every plant that got this curling seemed to get the first symptoms on the same day and they got worse for about a week and then started to recover or die. None of my oldest plants has died but some that had been out for over a month did. I feel it must have been something that came in on the wind or in the rain because all of the symptoms showed up within a couple of hours.

Below are a couple of pictures. The first is a part of a row of plants set out after getting the leaf curl and having the main stem cut. The other two are closeups of the small plants showing good healthy growth from the suckers. In the middle one you can easily see where the stem was cut off.